[Axiom-developer] Fricas

[daly]

Cliff,

> Tim, perhaps you could upload a page to the wiki defining in a concise
> manner the original foundational project goals, so we have a place to
> refer to for this discussion?

<http://axiom.axiom-developer.org/axiom-website/currentstate.html>
contains the project goals as of Oct, 2004 representing years of work.
They were update regularly to reflect changes and progress. The goals 
changed over time as it became obvious that some could not work 
(e.g. funding). 

* As you can see, hyperdoc, sman, etc. did not work at that time.
* You can see that I succeeded in converting BLAS Fortran to Aldor.
* You can see the work started to convert BLAS to pamphlet form (still
  ongoing in a local branch). 
* You can see that I was rewriting Magnus to be literate and merge with 
  Axiom. This code exists and was contributed to the Magnus source tree. 
* You can see that building Axiom on CMUCL was in plan but not started.
* You can see that there is an approved project to Journal papers which
  would be drag-and-drop <http://www.gnu.org/axiom/Journal> and that I
  worked with Carlo Traverso at the University of Pisa and the ACM on it.
* You can see the crystal idea.
* You can see the proviso research.
* You can see Indefinites, which got NSF grant funding.
* You can see the Doyen effort, spun off as a separate project now
  <http://sourceforge.net/projects/doyencd>
* You can see the discussions with Boyer&Moore and Chandy&Misra on
  the subject of proving Axiom correct.
* You can see the discussion with Artimov on using HOL Theorem provers.
* You can see the goal of training axiom internal developers and setting
  up a CVS on tenkan.org.
* You can see work to support French computer algebra (OSCAS)
* You can see the effort to set up savannah as a public website.
* You can see the Rosetta effort, which collected about 100 computer
  algebra systems and distributed them on the Rosetta CD set.
* You can see the axiom-website and its death (tombstoning) for the wiki.
* You can see my efforts to generate funding.
* You can see the instructions for anyone to modify Axiom
  <http://arch.axiom-developer.org/index.html>
* You can see instructions on how to submit patches
  <http://axiom.axiom-developer.org/axiom-website/faq.html>


What you don't see is that a lot of these items were generated by 
discussions with people in the community at the time.

Mike Dewar was vital in releasing Axiom.
Arthur Norman released and helped with CCL.
Tim Daly, Jr. set up the Tenkan site.
Camm Maguire was instrumental in re-use of GCL.
Barry Trager contributed his PhD thesis.
Manuel Bronstein contributed his thesis and supported Axiom at ISSAC.
Tom Lord helped with Arch and gave a lecture in my course at CCNY.
Bill Page suggested and implemented a wiki.
Carlo Traverso worked with me on LiveJournal/LiterateJournal.
David Mentre suggested noweb.
Federic Lehobey suggested OSCAS.
William Sit participated in NSF grant funding.
Joris Van der Hoeven suggested TeXmacs and the savannah website.
Gilbert Baumslag supported the literate Magnus and Axiom work.
Emil Volcheck was supportive of ACM related activities.
William Walster worked with me on interval analysis.
etc.

All of this work existed about 3 years ago.
When the wiki was started this list was no longer maintained.

To suggest that this is "Tim's project" and that I set all the goals
is to rewrite history in a very negative way. It minimizes the efforts
and contributions of a large number of people, all named (or intended
to be named) in the list of Axiom credits.

Tim