Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: OpenAxiom-1.2.1 released

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 12:38 PM,  <address@hidden> wrote:
>> As I understand it, you could easily prevent forking by pushing Axiom to
>> user more actively, it could have the functionality of OpenAxiom or FriCAS,
>> but it has lost the momentum. From user point of view the confusion is
>> of no importance as long as one of fors works and another one does not.
>
> Aleksej,
>
> As I understand it, one fundamental difference between OpenAxiom and Axiom
> lies in the project goals related to the boot language. Approximately half
> of the Axiom internals is written directly in common lisp. The other half
> is written in a "syntactic sugar language", called boot, which compiles to
> common lisp.
>
> The Axiom project had, since it was released as open source, the
> stated goal of removing the boot language code. Indeed, this was a
> goal I had while working on Axiom before it was ever released from IBM
> in the late 80s.
>
> The OpenAxiom project has the exact opposite goal of writing everything
> in boot and developing boot as a language.

Tim is almost right -- OpenAxiom aims to move away from Lisp as implementation
language.  That goal of OpenAxiom is in line with the original AXIOM project
(which led to A#, then Aldor).  I have it from first hand the original project
wasn't meant to be written entirely in Lisp.  However, that was an issue of
occasional debate.  I suspect that will continue for the foreseeable future.
By the way, the Boot in OpenAxiom is inaccurately described as
a syntactic sugar for Common Lisp.

>
> Given that the goals of OpenAxiom are directly opposed to the stated
> project goals of Axiom, how do you see that this difference should be
> resolved?
>
> Tim
>