On May 30, 2007, at 09:17 , William Stein 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. For the record, there is a very simple way to drop LaTeX on a Mac (follow the MacTeX link from the TUG homepage). I think most mathematicians will have LaTeX already. I don't know that this will be the case for some of our target audience (beginning students, for example), but it is readily available and simple to install (for Mac OS, Linux, and Windoze, or so I've been lead to believe). Making a non-optional package with a dependency on a (large) "external" package may be problematic, though. Justin -- Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-at-Large () The ASCII Ribbon Campaign /\ Help Cure HTML Email --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
