Re: [Axiom-developer] Aldor and Axiom - alternatives?

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

Cliff Yapp <address@hidden> writes:

| On Wednesday 13 September 2006 11:56 pm, Page, Bill wrote:
| 
| > I think that this is so far past our current skill level and
| > the available resources that there is virtually no chance that
| > this will ever be anything but a paper exercise.
| 
| I think it MIGHT be possible for us to make SPAD support the key 
| feature or two we want from Aldor (type behavior, etc.) but even 
| if we do that, we are still faced with the problem that SPAD as 
| a language in Axiom does not have any really good foundation as 
| a documented language.   I guess my question to those of us 
| looking to improve SPAD is this - even if we can change it to 
| support the feature or two we need, how do we document the 
| language?

we just do it. :-)
Whether we convert to Aldor or some other language, we still need to
know the semantics of the SPAD language.  After all, the algebra files
have meanings (with bugs or not).

| Do we have the resources to make a really formal 
| definition?

if we don't then we don't have the resource to move to another
language -- whether imporved SPAD, Aldor, or...

|  How do we tie those definitions to something that a 
| theorem prover could use?

that is called research :-) 

[...]

|                                 Since to make files fully 
| literate we need to not only understand the code but the origins 
| and definitions of the algorithms being implemented, we are 
| looking at a massive effort to spruce up the algebra code no 
| matter which way we go on the programming language side.  I 
| suspect (although I could be wrong) that understanding and 
| documenting properly the design considerations and mathematical 
| theory behind the SPAD code will be such a large effort that the 
| language considerations become secondary, except for the 
| question of what language has the most potential for benefiting 
| us at the 30 year horizon.

In five  years, we might yet another (new) language is better
suited... 

-- Gaby