On May 30, 5:37 am, "Joel B. Mohler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wednesday 30 May 2007 02:50, William Stein wrote: > > > > *Asymptote(http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/) (GPL) > > >Asymptoteparticularly might be interesting if you eventually want to do > > > diagrams (2d or 3d) in SAGE. > > > ThisAsymptoteprogram 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 "Asymptoteis a powerful script-based vector > > graphics language for technical drawings, inspired by MetaPost > > but with an improved C++-like > > syntax.Asymptoteprovides for figures the same high-quality level of > > typesetting that LaTeX does for scientific text." > > Asymptotedoes 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). It's written as a C++ish replacement of MetaPost, so they tried to adhere to MetaPost ideas in the language. I think the MetaPost influence is good in that it makes the language more natural for easily building diagrams. But you're right about the expense of maintaining a custom language---I don't know how solid the community is committed to maintaining their own language or even how big the community is. Jason --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
