[Axiom-developer] Axiom, SPAD, and Aldor

[C Y]

For those of you not on or watching the Aldor list, there was a
discussion some days ago by some of our key players about it being time
either to bring the SPAD compiler up to a standard that supports what
we need or begin a re-implementation of Aldor.  With that in mind, I
have a couple of questions:

1)  If we want to bring things up to the Aldor standard, what do we do
about literate documentation?  In the Aldor User Guide (which IIRC has
the formal Aldor language specification somewhere in the back) are the
following tidbits:

"No part of this Manual may be reproduced, transcribed, stored in a
retrieval system, translated into any language or computer language or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the copyright owner."

That would seem to rule out our incorporating this into Axiom as a
literate documentation of any sort.  In fact, if you interpret this
strongly, just downloading it and printing it seems to be an issue.  I
assume this is not what they were after but regardless we seem to be
out of luck.

I dislike the thought of drifting away from the Aldor community as far
as language goes but the above restrictions are going to make it a bit
tough to make something that is documented and compatible with Aldor. 
(In particular, if we can't reproduce the language definition in the
back, how are we supposed to formally describe the lanaguage in Axiom?)

"Aldor, AXIOM and the AXIOM logo are trademarks of NAG."

Axiom we presumably have permission to use (since we're calling our
project Axiom, after all) but Aldor we don't have permission to use so
whatever we do develop calling the result Aldor might not be the best
move.

2)  If we take SPAD as a start, use Aldor as a source of ideas, and
roll our own improvements and docs (either keeping the SPAD name or
calling it something else) that would avoide the problems above, but
that leaves the more mundane issues:  how to proceed and what actually
needs to be done/documented/designed.

3)  Whatever happened to the implementation of Aldor in Aldor that was
mentioned on the list some time back?  Was that for real and if so is
it available?

Cheers,
CY

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