Hi, On Mon, 29 Dec 2008 12:28:52 -0800 (PST) mabshoff <mabsh...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Dec 29, 12:17 pm, "William Stein" <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > The possibility to dump lisp and maxima entirely from Sage keeps > > popping into my head. I would like this thread to be entirely 100% > > about the technical *feasibility* of removing maxima as a standard > > component of Sage. Whether or not this is good/bad/political > > correct, desirable, or undesirable, I hope won't be discussed in > > *this* thread. > > > > To start this off, in order to remove Maxima, we would have to use > > Pynac (=ginac) (+ more) to at least mostly duplicate the calculus > > functionality that we currently use. Is there anything else we > > would need to do? How feasible is this? > > Is this under the assumption that we do not lose functionality, i.e. > integration? What advanced calculus functionality do we use from maxima? Besides integration, limits and the differential equation solver. (We don't use any of the difference equation solvers in maxima.) It would be good to start a wiki page to make a list of what needs to be replaced/rewritten to be able to drop the maxima dependency without losing functionality. > What would be very nice to do would be do actually fill in the missing > bits in the pynac integration (plotting?) and switch over the default > to pynac at SD12. This will be my project then. I am hoping to complete most of the low level changes needed on the pynac side which are required for the integration by SD12. It would be great if I got some help from people familiar with the current symbolics code to move forward with making pynac the default symbolics backend during SD12. It might be optimistic to say we can switch over after SD12, but I'm sure we can get pretty close. We should also look for alternative ways to provide the functionality we currently call maxima for, and make sure the pynac interface plays well with those alternatives. E.g., we should make sure that converting back and forth between sympy expressions and pynac expressions works well. > > I don't mean to suggest this could be trivially done by anybody > > right now. I'm talking about feasibility in the sense of several > > very hard weeks work by one of the top 10 Sage developers. > > Assuming we do not lose functionality: I don't think this can be > realistically done until Sympy is "good" enough and that is more than > a couple weeks of work away. To get integration up to speed would > probably take a rather large amount of work and even limits probably > need some more work to components like series expansion and so on IIRC > what Ondrej stated last time I talked to him. When these things pop into my head, I imagine that in 1 to 1.5 years we will have proper integration, limits, assumptions, etc. in Sage. This maybe a bit optimistic, but I don't count on progress elsewhere for this dream. :) It would definitely be great to be able to just use Sympy for some things though. Cheers, Burcin --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
