On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Ondrej Certik wrote: > > On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 5:10 PM, Bill Page wrote: >> ... >> Anyway, I think there is a lot of potential for improvement in the >> existing 'axiom.py' interface even without considering how to >> solve the problem of an efficient application program interface. >> One thing that I miss a lot when using Axiom from the Sage >> notebook is the ability to embed Spad code and compile it. This >> should be quite straightforward to add to 'axiom.py'. >> >> I would be glad to work with anyone else interested in improving >> the Axiom/FriCAS interface for Sage. > > In the long term there should be a way to call lisp from C or > Python directly. Then all the problems above could be solved > much more easily. If the only way of interacting with lisp is over a > pexpect interface, then something is very wrong. >
I agree that an efficient API is desirable - especially if some external program is to be called very often to perform some small operation that is part of some larger calculation. That certainly is the case for the way Sage uses Maxima now. In this case the lack of an efficient API is a big limitation. But I do not see how this is the case with Axiom. It is not clear to me that any of "the problems above could be solved much more easily" given such an API. From my point of view the problems are at a different conceptual level. There is supposed to be an "easy" way to call programs compiled with ECL from C (and thus via some suitable wrapper from Python or from Cython), but I have yet to see this demonstrated. Even in this case there remains the problem of conversion of data structures which is likely to add back some (hopefully small part) of the overhead that you removed by eliminating pexpect. Regards, Bill Page. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
