Re: [Axiom-developer] Axiom meeting at ISSAC

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Wed, 1 Aug 2007, Stephen Wilson wrote:

| Gabriel Dos Reis <address@hidden> writes:
| > (1) Which, of course, are untrue.

You asked the following questions:

    (i) Can it incrementally parse input as the user is typing, thus 
       making it a usable component in an IDE?  

   (ii) Is the AST itself specified?  

  (iii) Does it the representation past the lexical analysis phase contain
       line and column number information? 

   (iv) Is the current implementation easily modifiable and extensible?


(i) is open to debate and interpretation.
(ii) does not need a new parser or compiler to be solved.  I claim
    that the AST is self-descriptive for the most part -- that does
    excuse the non-existence of public documentation though.
    For a data-point, Jacob did not need much to get his way through 
    the AST system.

(iii) of course, the answer is yes.  As I mentioned earlier, there are two
    parser in Axiom, an old and a new.  You're looking at the old compiler.

[...]

| The system is not extensible or flexible by any rational
| measurement.  

I suspect it is more accurate to say:

  The system is not extensible or flexible by any Stephen Wilson's
  measurement.

Care should be exercised before generalizing to "rational".

| > (2) And, as expected, your questions were rhetorical.
| 
| Of course they were.  I was trying to explain the work I am doing and
| you effectively dismissed it by saying "you dont need to wait for a
| new compiler", which is not true.

"dismiss" is the way you chose to see a *factual statement* that
the current compiler can be used as a library roday, and that has been
done for real.

I would not venture to say that if I speculated you would have interpreted 
it as "celebrated".  Anyway, I'm quite amazed.

[...]

| I will be more than happy to discount your autoconf patch when it is
| ready based on the fact that we already have a build system which more
| or less works,  if your interested in that kind of collaboration.

You must have a serious problem.

-- Gaby