Robert Bradshaw wrote: > On Aug 30, 2008, at 4:46 PM, Robert Dodier wrote:
> > From the direction this discussion has taken I'm guessing that > > nobody here is aware that selective evaluation is trivial in Lisp, > > and Maxima. In both cases a single quote marks stuff that > > isn't evaluated. > I actually did know that lisp has this feature. The real question is > how to expose such a feature in a natural way in the Sage (Python) > environment. FWICT there is not indeed any natural way to do it. It seems within the realm of possibility to develop a superset of Python which has a modified evaluation policy. Existing programs would act the same in this hypothetical language, but there could be new constructs (quoting and evaluating, unevaluated and partially-evaluated expressions, maybe more) which extend the language. > Using Python has worked out very nice both for the UI > and core library--I don't see this changing anytime soon. There are days when I want to use Python as the UI language; it is a much stronger programming language than the existing Maxima language. There is an implementation of Python in Lisp, namely CLPython. I have toyed with the idea of using CLPython as the UI language for Maxima. > And as beautiful lisp is as a language, it seems even Maxima > decided that it wasn't suited for the front end of a CAS. The Maxima language has the same code = data principle as in Lisp. That's much more important than parenthesis or the lack of them. All the best Robert Dodier --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-support@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-support URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
