On Jan 21, 2008 4:16 PM, Ted Kosan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> William wrote:
>
> > Today at the AMS meeting Tom Boothby and I had a long talk with the
> > people at the "Wiris Booth":
> > http://www.wiris.com/
> > Wiris is a closed source commercial math software company that makes a
> > web-based interface to their own custom mathematical software.
>
> Was the idea of Wiris using Sage as an additional calculation engine
> for their client discussed at all?
No. Wiris is a commercial company
and I got the very strong impression that they view Sage as basically
potential competition whose mere existence is bad for them. In fact,
they're right to be worried, since there have been discussions
on sage-devel about modifying Sage
so that it could be rolled out in France/Spain for high school and college
use -- and that is _exactly_ the current market of Wiris. I definitely
suggested various times opportunities for collaboration, but I don't think they
were interested at all and would rather we just didn't exist.
I was also pretty soundly criticized by someone else at the Wiris booth for (1)
not using OpenMath/MathML for communication between different components
of Sage, and (2) for not having an OpenMath output / input format for every
Sage object. I'm not really interested in starting a discussion
about this here
on sage-devel -- all that OpenMath stuff is nice in theory, but it doesn't have
much to do with the sort of problems Sage is built to solve. With Sage the
goal is to create the best system we can using when possible very good
existing tools -- and the question is how best to do this. OpenMath doesn't
fit in at all for that problem. It may be very relevant for other
problems later on;
I don't know. Just for concreteness, imagine if when you typed
expand( (x+1)^3 )
the following happened:
(1) (x+1)^3 is converted to some sort of XML openmath format.
(2) That openmath format is sent to maxima via pexpect
(3) A maxima function that I guess I would write converts that
XML into a valid Maxima expression
(4) Sage then requests calling expand on the result
(5) Sage then asks Maxima to take that result and convert
it to XML openmath format.
(6) Sage asks Maxima to display the XML format and Sage reads it back.
(7) Sage parses the XML format and constructs the Sage expression
x^3 + 3*x^2 + 3*x + 1
This would just be a much more complicated, slower, and vastly more
error prone version of what we already do. I see no value in it whatever.
-- William
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