[Axiom-developer] Re: Axiom and common lisp tools

[Martin Rubey]

address@hidden writes:

> Martin,
> 
> > Did you care to look at SandboxHyperDocReplacement? Your mail makes me a
> > little angry, I must confess.
> 
> I'm sorry that you have an emotional reaction to my exploration of the space
> of possible solutions. I didn't set out to anger you.
> 
> Your code is not the first attempt at making web pages from Axiom 

It seems that you did not try my code.  It shows something that has not been
tried so far, namely accessing the databases using SPAD, and integrating tex4ht
to get html (or mathml or whatever) output.

> and it certainly won't be the last. You wrote some lisp and spad and then
> suggested that SOMEONE should write it up as a pamphlet.

That was not my intention.  I said that I would put more work into it, provided
somebody would try it and succeed on MS-windows.

I did not get any feedback at all.

> I've been looking at this issue since Bill Page joined this effort
> years ago. He insisted that the only reasonable path for Hyperdoc
> replacement was a web browser. It took him a while to convince me.
> Now I'm convinced. I have a simple version running locally but its
> not ready to be introduced to the world.

You know that I share this belief.  With the additional requirement that *any*
webbrowser should do.

> Given a browser front end:

I don't want a browser front end.  I want a working HyperDoc for MS-Windows,
that is good enough to support documentation as written for ALLPROSE.

>   how do we communicate without hanging axiom?

Did my hack hang you axiom?  That would be interesting feedback, really.

>   how do we communicate without running many axioms?

Why would you care?

>   how do we handle requests for dynamic content?
>     (axiom knows the libraries but the documentation connection
>      is weak. someone recently suggested output of the function
>      comments should be added to the )d op ... command)

I did, since there is still no HyperDoc on Windows.  I thought that this might
be an easy way to help windows people.

>     (axiom uses pamphlets. there needs to be an architecture for displaying
>     links to and for displaying the contents of pamphlets)

Did you try my code?

>     (axiom documentation needs structure that gets generated dynamically.
>      how is this going to be done?)

Did you try my code?

>   how do we handle graphics?

As an aside, I should say that during my demonstration of axiom at the faculty
of maths, people were quite impressed by the quality of 3d graphics in axiom.
I don't know gnuplot, but some said that gnuplot would be quite inferiour.
Mathematica's and Maple's graphics definitively are.

>   how do we handle output?
>     (axiom generates latex now. 
>      should it generate html? 

no.  It should generate high quality latex.  tex4ht should generate html.  Ahm,
did you try my code, by the way?

>     (if the toolchain is common lisp we could dynamically construct
>     s-expressions that could be evaluated anywhere along the chain (in spad,
>     in the interpreter, in the web interface, in the browser) this would
>     allow us to construct domain calls in the browser, evaluate them in
>     axiom, and send them back to the front end)

So, what is an s-expression for a polytope?  (It is currently represented by a
file managed by polymake.  Very likely this interface will change some day.)

It seems to me that you are thinking of EXPR INT only.

Martin