Re: [Axiom-developer] RE: mathaction

[Arthur Norman]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2004, Camm Maguire wrote:
> Greetings, all!  The site looks great!  I just have one request -- it
> should be made clear early on that reduce is not open source software.
> It appears from their site that they are selling the source under some
> circumstances however (cannot see where though).  It would be helpful
> if someone could report on whether their conditions would allow
> inspection of the source for use in spotting bugs in axiom.  Am also
> wondering if standard lisp, as a 'subset', will run on gcl much as the
> 'applicative common lisp' subset does in acl2.
>
> Take care,
> --
If you follow www.reduce-algebra.com you will find that a "personal" 
version of Reduce is available (for perhaps a limited range of platforms) 
and that comes without source, and there is a "professional" version that 
comes with source (and in some cases  full source of the Lisp use dto 
build it). And of course multiple-installation and site licenses are also 
available.
Reduce has two distributors who use different Lisp systems, both 
conforming to "standard lisp". At one stage a mapping of that onto Common 
Lisp was available but that is no longer supported or available. One of 
the versions of Reduce is built on and comes with my "CSL" Lisp system and 
when NAG distributed Axiom I had adjustments to that that supported enough 
of the common lisp-isms that Axiom built on it. To my mind the key 
featuures of what was done there were that (a) one compiled image file 
could then be run on almost any platform (windows, linux, lots of sorts of 
Unix) so the need for per-platform compilation of all that Lisp was 
removed. And platform-specific glitches and incompatibilities would be 
minimised. (b) at the time Axiom was notably a resource hog by the 
standard of workstations available and "CCL" (thing S=standard, C=common, 
L=lisp, c=Codemist) allowed it to run with a relatively modest footprint.

Note that some in the new Axiom world have declared use of CCL to be one 
of the worst mistakes anybody ever made wrt Axiom and that my Lisp is thus 
to be abhored.. so do not get too enthusiastic.

     Arthur