Re: [Axiom-developer] Openmath, Singular

[Michael Brickenstein]

Hello Bill!

I will forward the mail about the bug report to the singular mailing  
list (address@hidden).
But you shouldn't care about it, Singular should work fine without  
this dynamic module "kstd.so".
In fact, dynamic modules are quite new in Singular and still  
experimental.

The only problem which could arise: At the moment gcc-4.0.x does not  
support boost::python on my Mac, which is needed for the python  
interface, on which openmath depends.
So for that, it might me necessary to use a different compiler. But  
time will solve this, boost is one of the
projects with biggest compiler support.

The most important I wanted to write you is, that while you cannot  
use Singular directly on a python level, I can licence my python  
openmath library to you. At the moment, I did not yet decide for a  
certain licence. Using GPL would simplify things very much.

In principal however I tend to use a very liberal licence and have  
yet to check, if this would exclude me from using Singular (which is  
GPL), which I have strictly to avoid.

It is generic (doesn't depend on any CAS), uses only standard python  
libraries, is designed to be customizable (at least offers the  
possibility to improve this point), compact.

The limitations are: I have to clean up code and add some more  
documentations than "FIXME:" comments.
While there exists some Singular plugin and everything is strictly  
seperated, there does not exist a sophisticated plugin mechanism at  
the moment. Also, it does not yet provide network support.
The cleanup will need a little bit time.

Since I am in contact with SAGE, which also uses Python, the library  
could be the base for a common work, using the CAS as plugins, so it  
will be improved in time.  If also MathAction would use it, this  
would be a joy of my heart: I write my software for being used (very  
surprising). ;-)

Yours,
Michael Brickenstein