Re: [Axiom-mail] (no subject)

[Martin Rubey]

Bjarke Roune writes:
 > Hi
 > 
 > I'm new to Axiom. 

Welcome!

 > Is there some kind of comprehensive and searchable
 > documentation for what the various packages of Axiom do? The book in the
 > distribution only contains a little bit about some of the packages. I'm
 > thinking about a kind of "API documentation" in the style "this function
 > takes these parameters and does this and that".
 > 
 > More concretely, I want to implement a Groebner basis algorithm in Axiom
 > (The F4 algorithm of Faugere). However, I cannot find out how to make a
 > polynomial monic. What is the procedure to find out how to do something like
 > that?

Hmm, I use trial and error. And I'm lucky, since I've got the book by
Jenks/Sutor, and in the printed version there is a nice summary of many
commands. I don't really know why it's missing from the online version. (It
should be Appendix E...)

However, all the stuff which should be in Appendix E is in the source files,
roughly the comments following "++".

It often helps to look at the available commands of your domain using

)sh UP

for example. Also, if I'm looking for something, I try to imagine which
algorithms could use that something and read the source code there. That way, I
also found quite some bugs :-)

To make a polynomial monic, you can use divide by leadingCoefficient, of
course, but you probably knew that...

 > Given the name of a package, how can I find the pamphlet file that contains
 > the code for that package?

I use (at a unix command prompt)

grep ")abbr.* INT " *

since the information by asq is not correct at the moment.

Good luck,

Martin