On 5/30/07, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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.
You may already be aware of it, but in case you aren't, PyX is worth knowing about: http://pyx.sourceforge.net/ It does have the latex dependency issue, but it's already in python and is a lovely way to do diagrams that don't really fall well under matplotlib's 'data plotting' sweet spot but that are more algorithmic in nature. Think of it as a 'pythonized PostScript' if you will, rendered via LaTeX. I love it for some specialized uses. Cheers, f --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
