Re: performance and eloquence

I don't like getting mad.
Maxima and Macsyma of which I both have and use have composed their entire
user interface using basically a custom reader as far as I can tell. To
integrate that with a common lisp knowledge based engineering system would
be just slightly harder than heaving an ornery gorilla over a ten foot wall
by myself. You know I suppose I could write the KBE system *in* macsyma,
but then it wouldn't be lisp, would it. Not only would I be stuck with
Maxima's immense inertia, but integrating everything from a webserver to
animation facilities would be a complete bitch.

I am not saying that maxima should not be a source of knowledge, it would be
idiotic to dump it, but if someone were to at least put a 1 character reader
macro of the type like (, {, [, or | which you could nest lisp code into,
and share variables between lisp and maxima, then I would use it more.
Maxima, despite being written in lisp, is not compatible with lisp. Mixing
lisp code and maxima code on the same page would be worse than writing in C.
as it currently is.

Why are Lisp people such smart-alecs?

"John Thingstad" <john.thingstad@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:op.tgpllby0pqzri1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Sat, 30 Sep 2006 22:40:37 +0200, Andrew Wolven <awolven@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

But why am I wasting my freaking time hunting down fast algorithms to do
Matrices. Matrices are the eloquent way of solving problems like
splines,
and I have found out from Matt D. and Richard Fateman that either you
have
more declarations than code or you do everything with lists. Either way
I
can't read my own code to know what is going on!!!
That is neither the heart of Lisp nor KBE. Your code should be almost
self
explanatory and only require comments to explain the logic behind the
*concept* of the problem you are trying to solve and not comments
describing
optimization tricks.

Well there is maxima...

Maxima is a system for the manipulation of symbolic and numerical
expressions, including differentiation, integration, Taylor series,
Laplace transforms, ordinary differential equations, systems of linear
equations, polynomials, and sets, lists, vectors, matrices, and tensors.
Maxima yields high precision numeric results by using exact fractions,
arbitrary precision integers, and arbitrarily precision floating point
numbers. Maxima can plot functions and data in two and three dimensions.

http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

Dosn't that contain what you are looking for?

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