[Axiom-developer] Axiom

[root]

Bill,

You missed Axiom, a full featured system that was developed at IBM Research
for 23 years, sold commercially as a competitor to Mathematica and Maple
for 7 years by the Numerical Algorithms Group and then released as free
and open source software under the BSD license. It's been in development
for the last 4 years.

It's written almost entirely in Common Lisp. The only non-lisp portion
of the multi-million lines of code is the graphics front end. We'd like
to rewrite this into lisp by haven't found the right approach.

The system was completely rewritten in a literate programming sytle
when it became free. There are no lisp files, no C files, no Makefiles,
etc. Everything is a latex document. The actual code is embedded in the
documents and extracted at build time. The idea is due to Knuth (Web)
and we use an implementation that is language independent (noweb, by
Norman Ramsey). I think you'll find the idea of literate lisp interesting.

In addition you should check out the wiki front end that Bill Page 
has developed. http://wiki.axiom-developer.org. The sandbox link will
allow you to input algebra and output the results. We think it's the
way to go in the future.

Tim Daly