RE: [Axiom-developer] SAGE and Axiom

[Bill Page]

On Sat 5 Aug 2006 23:56:25 -0700 (PDT) address@hidden wrote:

> Subject: Re: Fwd: Axiom point of view... 
> 
> I'm very excited about the notebook getting used by more systems.
> Like David said, you can already do this to a large extent with SAGE
> as it stands.  However, you'll undoubtably want tighter integration.
> I'm sure you'll understand that I'd rather see this happen through
> SAGE -- I'm willing to help a fair amount to this end.
>

I apologize for starting in the middle of this exchange. I wasn't
able to retrieve any archived messages from this thread in the
SourceForge archive, so I hope you will forgive that some of my
questions have already been addressed.

By "tighter integration" are you referring to converting to and
from Axiom data structures and Sage data structures and therefore
allowing the results of calculations from one system to be
translated and used in another? As you might know, Axiom is
quite distinct from most other computer algebra systems in the
extent to which it employs strong typing and an object-orientation.
Do you think that therefore such "tight integration" might present
more problems with Axiom and Sage compared to, say the existing
Maxima-Sage interface?
 
> However, if you would be interested in helping make a wiki-style
> IDE, I'm quickly starting to believe that this may become a new 
> way to work on a project.  William and I have discussed this a
> little, but this idea has been brewing over the past few months.
> Within the next week or two, I'll try and outline my ideas for what
> this system would entail.  Oooh.  Maybe I'll do this on our new
> wiki.
>

I am very glad to hear confirmation of interest in concept of using
a wiki for integrated collaborative development of mathematical
software. This is something that we have been trying to do for some
time now in Axiom. I am still a strong believer in this idea even
though I have to admit that we have not yet been very successful in
establishing any serious and long term projects of this nature that
depend critically on the Axiom Wiki.

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org

I would be very interested to hear more about your plans for "our
new wiki". I recall that parts of Sage are written in Python and
depends on Zope. The Axiom Wiki is uses the Zwiki Zope product with
extensions to provide LaTeX support and interfaces to Axiom and
Reduce. As Tim has mentioned we have also developed a new page
type for ZWiki which implements some of the components of a
literate programming environment for Axiom. At the present time
all of the Axiom source code is accessible (and editable) in this
environment but we have not yet completed the direct integration of
this wiki interface with the rest of the Axiom build environment.

So I am very interested to hear your ideas about how this sort
of thing should work.

Regards,
Bill Page.