On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 6:38 PM, root <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >> I have no idea why you think ECLS is a silver bullet. > > > >I forgot one important argument here: With ecls you can embed the lisp > >interpreter into an external library, hence we would be able to use > >Maxima as a library instead of using the inefficient pexpect > >interface. I am not sure how much work this would be, but if I were a > >Maxima coder I would certainly look into that possibility since it > >opens a whole lot of possibilities for Maxima IMHO - totally > >independent of Maxima's role in Sage. > > I looked at pexpect. It appears to be a process controller of sorts > that interprets and parses console I/O. > Axiom has its own version called sman (superman). You don't normally > type directly at the axiom command prompt but are talking to sman > which mediates the console i/o. Sman manages a set of processes > (the AXIOMsys interpreter, the graphics, hyperdoc, etc) but makes > it appear that you are talking to axiom. You could talk directly > to the AXIOMsys system prompt or directly to AXIOMsys thru a network > port (which is how the Axiom Firefox works). But sman doesn't actually > parse anything at all. It is just a very small C program which forks > processes and sets up ptys and thus has nearly zero overhead. > > I'm not sure what Maxima does. But I'd bet that almost all of the > overhead you're seeing isn't Maxima but pexpect delay.
Are you saying that all the *overhead* we're seeing with communicating with Maxima via pexpect is overhead associated with pexpect? That's kind of circular. > Somebody > is probably playing parsing games to get prompt and end-of-input > processing and that has got to cost a lot. Why not just reach into > the lisp and do it directly? How does one just "reach into lisp"? > Why use a console connection at all? > Using pexpect has got to be the worst of all possible ways to talk > to Maxima. Sort of like how democracy is the worst of all possible governments that work or something. Anyway, one bonus of using Maxima via pexpect is that it works, and moreover almost the same code that works for this works for using about 15 other math software systems from Sage in almost exactly the same way. > In any case, it is certainly possible to use lisp as a library > element rather than using pexpect. That's great news. Could you implement using lisp as a library element from python? Thanks. 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://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
