[Axiom-developer] Maxima on DoyenCD

[Bill Page]

On August 12, 2006 2:44 AM Alfredo Portes wrote:

>...
>>> Maxima is working now for me [in Doyen CD wiki]. Thanks for
>>> all the help.
>>

You are welcome. :)

> ...
> This is a great work you did with Maxima. Now that I have
> been reading the code these days, I wonder if I could get
> another CAS to work inside the wiki, maybe YACAS???

I think it would be great to have interfaces to more computer
algebra systems in Doyen CD and on MathAction. I would be glad
to help with any project of this kind that you or anyone else
decide to undertake. YACAS might be a good choice. I am currently
looking at another more specialized package recently recommended
by Bertfried Fauser called Cadabra, written by Kasper Peeters

http://www.aei.mpg.de/~peekas/cadabra/

As I have said several times before, the extensions that I made
to LatexWiki to support Axiom, Reduce and most recently Maxima
are really just a simple source filter hack in two parts.

The first part is a module to "wrap" the external program (e.g.
maximaWrapper.py) which runs a complete external session containing
multiple input sections in "batch mode" and then parses the
resulting output into sections corresponding to each input section.
The second part is a module (e.g. ReplaceInlineMaxima.py) that
extracts the input sections from the raw page source, e.g.

  ...
  \begin{maxima}
  section 1 commands
  \end{maxima}
  ...
  \begin{maxima}
  section 2 commands
  \end{maxima}
  ...

contains two input sections. It calls the wrapper to run the
external session and then replaces the input sections with output
sections in the page source. The result is passed on to the next
filter.

This is a batch process that is done once for each page preview
or when the page is saved so it does not have to be particularly
efficient.

The only challenging part is parsing the session output. In the
case of Maxima this was made particularly simple by the use of the
modified TeXmacs interface. All of the rest of the work is done by
LatexWiki and Zwiki and Zope.

> When I started working with Tim, this was one of his concerns, 
> getting other CAS output in the browser. Of course I never got
> to do something so advance and nice as you have inside the Wiki.

:) Well, thanks. But I think the Doyen CD is a pretty neat idea
too. I like how this is all coming together.

> ...
> I plan to make a new iso of Doyen tomorrow, please let me know
> if there is anything you would like me to include in it.

Well, I would definitely like to see the new web pages that you
created for Doyen on the new CD. For both Axiom and Maxima there
should be a few pages containing some examples and references
to other documentation. You can get these from the Axiom Wiki.
See for example:

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/SandBoxMaxima

Regards,
Bill Page.