[Axiom-developer] Re: SPAD and Aldor again

[Martin Rubey]

C Y <address@hidden> writes:

> I think we should make the decision as a project not to wait any longer for
> Aldor, and commit to improving SPAD - up until now I think there has been
> hesitation to commit serious effort to SPAD due to the possibility of Aldor
> becoming available and making such work unnecessary.  To my mind the first
> step to improving SPAD is to decide what SPAD should be, since right now it
> doesn't have a formal language definition.

For me this is totally clear: SPAD should become a free implementation of the
Aldor language. It would not make sense to have to different languages around.

And, as you know, in my opinion the first step in making this happen is to make
the Axiom interpreter (!) understand Aldor generated code, i.e., dependent
types.

Peter Broadbery is currently making Aldor extend work in Axiom. That's a giant
step, in fact! Unfortuantely, it seems that support for dependent types is even
more difficult. One would have to understand how aldor and axiom work
together. As far as I know, there are only very few people around who know
about this already. 

I guess it's Peter. Laurentiu says he doesn't know about the axiom side, but I
know he knows foam. Tim, do you know about that stuff?  Gaby, Waldek, did you
dig into this connection yet?

Martin