On 5/30/07, Joel B. Mohler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wednesday 30 May 2007 02:50, William Stein wrote: > > > * Asymptote (http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/) (GPL) > > > Asymptote particularly might be interesting if you eventually want to do > > > diagrams (2d or 3d) in SAGE. > > > > This Asymptote program is absolutely fascinating!! I've never heard of > > it. I'm extremely excited. Thanks for making me aware of this. I really > > like the sound of this "Asymptote is a powerful script-based vector > > graphics language for technical drawings, inspired by MetaPost > > but with an improved C++-like > > syntax. Asymptote provides for figures the same high-quality level of > > typesetting that LaTeX does for scientific text." > > Asymptote does look pretty exciting. I'd say the one big downside is that > they invented their own language. While the language looks like C++ and the > snippets appear to utilize a wide range of language features, I'm a bit > suspicious that a roll-your-own language is going to work out in the long > run. > > This pdf has lots of code snippets in it: > http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/intro.pdf > > It appears it's written in C++ and their own language. My personal > inclination would be to believe that we would want to write python bindings > for it replacing the custom language. It seems it could be a big job > (although not insurmountable).
Another big issue with asymptote is that I think it fundamentally depends on latex. Latex doesn't come pre-installed in OS X or most Linux installs, though of course it is easy to install in Linux. So far SAGE has got quite far with almost no dependencies -- latex is a pretty big dependency to add. Also, I'm concerned about the quality of 3d support in asymptote. We already have good 3d graphics, so the main reason to add asymptote would be for 3d graphics, where my impression is that it might not be that impressive after all. That said, it's well worth investigating asymptote further, especially given that it is GPL'd. William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
