[Axiom-developer] Changes and Plans

[daly]

The patch files are now available from the Axiom website.
All of the patches have been annotated with a one-line description.
<http://axiom.axiom-developer.org/axiom-website/patches.html>

There are 226 patches listed. Over a 1 year period 7/21/07-7/21/08
there were 218 patches, averaging about 4 patches per week over the year.

The system is being fundamentally restructured to work directly from 
the book format. One side-effect is a massive simplification of the
whole build procedure. The long term target is to remove the need for
make and noweb.

As you can see from the page:
<http://axiom.axiom-developer.org/axiom-website/documentation.html>
there are 15 volumes (the algebra will end up being multi-volumed).
These volumes will contain the complete system text in literate
format. Some of these have been developed over the past year.

INTERPRETER (vol. 5)

Portions of the interpreter now live in bookvol5.  Several boot files
have been rewritten from the lisp form and more are done (but not yet
released, awaiting testing). The new lisp code will be ANSI common
lisp compatible. Once the code is all lisp the bootsys image, boot
parser, and boot subdirectory will disappear.

HYPERDOC (vols. 7 and 7.1)

The hyperdoc code is in two books (vol7 is code, vol7.1 is pages).
The src/hyper directory is gone. The code in volume 7 is completely
restructured into single C files. This eliminates local include files
and requires only a single invocation of GCC, giving significant speed
improvements.

The hypertex command reads pages directly from vol7.1 instead of files.
This reduces the build time. The ht.db step will disappear shortly.

Volume 7.1 is a fully hyperlinked PDF so it is possible to walk static
portions of the hyperdoc pages directly in the PDF file without
running hypertex. See the hyperlinks below the page images.

Both volumes will have more documentation added.

GRAPHICS (vol. 8)

Currently graphics code is all built from bookvol8.  The src/graph
subdirectory is gone. The next step is detailed code documenation.
The code in volume 8 is completely restructured into single C files.
Tests are being developed against the CRC Handbook of Curves and
Surfaces.

FIREFOX (vol. 11)

The firefox browser lives in bookvol11. All of the xhtml pages are
currently extracted at build time but the plan is to read the xhtml
directly from the book sources, similar to hyperdoc pages. Further
work is planned to port pages from hyperdoc. Firefox is a superset of
hyperdoc and contains new pages which are not in hyperdoc. Grahics 
can now be run from firefox pages.

Tim