Re: [Axiom-developer] CAD package from Renaud Rioboo

[Ralf Hemmecke]

Hi Tim,

> Thank Renaud. He wrote it. 

I know. And of course, credit also goes to him, but you are going
through the email archive and dig out important things so that they are
not forgotten. At least *I* appreciate that.

> I have had only two lasting frustrations with FriCAS.
> 
> My first frustration was the confusion over names.  This seems to be
> mostly resolved (modulo still using the AXIOM shell variable, which
> causes conflicts).

I'm somewhat surprised. Yes, FriCAS still uses the AXIOM environment
variable. And you probably know that this is deeply hardcoded inside the
code. But for FriCAS that is an internal detail that you shouldn't have
to care about unless you start AXIOMsys directly. (Yes, in FriCAS it's
still called AXIOMsys.) The reason is that FriCAS does not require to
set AXIOM before you call "fricas" on the command line. In fact, the
shell script "fricas" explicitly sets AXIOM, so it is restricted to this
invocation and shouldn't have any effect on anything outside FriCAS. Not
even should it have any effect if you set AXIOM to anything before
calling "fricas".

> My second frustration is the lack of documentation.

Right so. As you know, I'm working on http://fricas.github.io/ . That's
not literate, but at least makes the API more visible on the web. More
to come.

> Other than that, I'm all in favor of more and better algebra available
> to everyone.

Yes, that's good. The difference in philosophy perhaps is that FriCAS
tries more to attract people through the power of the system whereas you
want to do this with good literate documentation. Well, both directions
are needed. I think that the most important thing is to get more people
interested in the code whether that will work with your "literate"
approach or in the way that FriCAS does it, is yet to be seen. Anyway,
the more people start looking into the code/documentation, the higher
the chances that it improves faster.

> Renaud's CAD package is clean, easy to install, and should be widely
> available, which is why I sent it. I would ask that any improvements
> be returned in kind.

Of course. In fact, I've recently subscribed to
https://github.com/daly.atom in order to follow, what you are doing. You
are probably doing the same with https://github.com/fricas.atom . I'm
all in favour of helping each other even though we have differing
opinions about the future direction of the project.

Ralf