RE: [Axiom-developer] RE: Conference

[Bill Page]

On October 13, 2006 6:34 PM Gaby wrote:
> 
> Bill Page writes:
> 
> | 
> | On October 12, 2006 11:57 AM Alfredo wrote
> | > 
> | > Hi Bill,
> | > 
> | > Wondering if you are back from Sage Days, and how did it go?
> | 
> | Yes, I am back. I would say that it went "well". And I have a
> | lot more to write about it when I have more time and energy -
> | maybe tomorrow.
> | 
> | In short: The Sage developers are certainly an enthusiastic,
> | energetic and ambitious group. I think Sage development
> | benefits greatly by being based in a university post-graduate
> | environment and with a lead developer who seems very much
> | "in-tune" with current open source development practices.
> | I wish Axiom had an active sponsor of this kind...
> 
> Hey, you should be more kind to Tim and others :-)
>

Yes, you are probably right - I should be more kind. I do really
appreciate all of the work that Tim, yourself and several other
people have put into Axiom over the last few years - even when
I don't entirely agree with particular design choices! :-)

My comment above was partly motivated by my "feeling old"
following a meeting with a mostly younger and naturally more
enthusiastic group. The contrast with the Axiom project is
striking. I guess there is just something not very sexy about
working on a software project that is older than the average
age of the developers. For example if you did a poll among
the Sage developers about the merits of Lisp versus Python you
can be quite sure where their sympathies would lie. Lisp is
legacy code. Period. Comparing Aldor (or SPAD) to Python might
be an interesting exercise but certainly not a mainstream. :-(

> [...]
> 
> | For example, there was a lot of discussion at the meeting
> | about implementing Padic integers as a computational domain
> | in Sage. I don't know anything about Padic integers but during
> | a quick presentation of the new Axiom interface that I wrote
> | during the coding sprints I demonstrated that Axiom actually
> | already implements at least one of the methods of representing
> | Padics that was being discussed. Of course, as Axiom developers
> | we already know that the Axiom algebra library covers large
> | (and sadly, mostly undocumented) area of computational
> | mathematics.
> 
> is that what padic.spad and spadiclib.spad touch?
> 

Yes. Axiom apparently implements an approach to padics which in
the parlance of the Sage meeting would be called "lazy padics".
As I understand it, the issue with padics is rather similar to
the issue of exact real arithmetic and the relationship to
continued fractions. Since Axiom's library language supports a
"functional" programming paradigm, it is possible to implement
such potentially infinite algebraic objects as Streams. This
is used as a representation for several different domains of
this kind in Axiom.

Regards,
Bill Page.