[Axiom-developer] Software Archaeology

[William Sit]

Hi Tim:
         
I came across the email by 

[Axiom-developer] Patches (?) for sum/product and sqrt
Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 14:21:38 +0200 (CEST)
From: "m.rubey" <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden

(aside: I suppose that the messages on the axiom site are sequenced, so it would
be convenient if this sequence number is part of the message broadcast, perhaps
added to the subject line like [axiom=developer xxxxx]. Using this reference may
save a lot of bandwidth since it is easy to lookup (how about also a http
link?))

and was trying to trace some of the code by Bronstein (dvdsum). It then occurs
to me that what is needed is a full documentation for undocumented Axiom code,
which means reconstructing the thoughts behind the design, etc, as well as the
mathematics. This I thought should be termed "software archaeology" (like
reading the papyrus). So there "should" be funding source for such an endeavor.
I google the term and came up with one single item: an abstract of a talk by one
Grady Booch, who happens to be an IBM Fellow (since 2003). He is quite keen on
software archaeology and maintains a blog. Here's the URLs:

http://www.booch.com/architecture/blog.jsp (read his June 7 blog; he has a
project called computer history museum and recommends reading Knuth's literate
programming)

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/rational/bios/booch.html (this is the IBM Fellow
and IBM Rational site on him)


http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~bieman/bmac/abstracts.html#Booch (this is the
abstract of his talk in 2002 on software archaeology).

Since I did not find any funding source, but he is a big shot ... you get the
idea. I would have written him for info, but you are the lead developer and you
were an IBMer.

I'll write separately on Rubey's reported bug (but for now, the problem is not
Bronstein's, in Axiom 2.3, each new()$Symbol generates a new variable name and
Bronstein used dummy:=new()$Symbol to define the iterating variable in product
and summation. The problem is from the upper limit of the summation being
numerical rather than a symbol.)

William
-- 
William Sit
Department of Mathematics..............Email: address@hidden
City College of New York..........................Tel: 212-650-5179
Convent Ave at West 138th Street..................Fax: 212-862-0004
New York, NY 10031............Axiom, A Scientific Computation Sytem
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