On May 1, 2007, at 21:25 , William Stein wrote:
> This GPL'd program called FreeMAT was mentioned in the recent
> slashdot thing
> on Mathematica 6.0:
At first blush, the app is in its early stages, and the developer(s)
seem to have given much weight to infrastructure: there are basics
for doing calculator-style operations, some debugging support,
documentation support, all 'integrated' with a GUI (platform-
specific). This part seems solid and well-designed.
There seems to be little "domain-specific" support, but a lot of
built-in functions, support for simple data types (arrays, matrices,
ints, reals, chars, strings), and function declarations.
I have not spent much time with this, but on the face of it, I'm not
sure that as it is, there is much here for SAGE: it has its own
interpreter, its unclear how it performs, and I can't tell the extent
to which you can add to the system from scripts (e.g., define new
operations or new data types). It appears that scripts are
interpreted, not 'compiled', but I didn't spend much time on it.
The GUI for Mac OS X (which seems homegrown, and similar to that for
the other platforms) seems nice. You get a main window for entering
expressions, an editor window to create 'scripts' (.m files); and
documentation windows with index/search/TOC tabs.
It seems well done. Perhaps there is something to be learned from
the approach, particularly the GUI. For math content, it's pretty
light, but if it catches on, or if the developer(s) have a lot of
energy, that can change.
Justin
--
Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-At-Large
Institute for the Absorption of Federal Funds
--------
Men are from Earth.
Women are from Earth.
Deal with it.
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