Re: [Maxima-discuss] Permutations & Permutation Group Theory

[Robert D. <rob...@gm...>]

On 2016-05-10, Robert Smith <qu...@sy...> wrote:

> I'm not sure how literal you meant "merging with Maxima". As for
> structure, I'd prefer to keep the library as a library. 

Yes, I believe only some superficial changes are needed. I guess one
could create glue functions which are callable by a Maxima user and have
those punt to the existing functions. Or one could rename the existing
functions. My preference is the latter, as I don't like glue code; but
I'll leave it to you to decide what to do about that.

I see CL-PERMUTATION is ASDF-loadable. That's terrific. Do I understand
correctly that it's Quicklisp-loadable? If so, that's intriguing. I
recently made some patches for Quicklisp to make it possible to use it
to load Maxima packages. But I think distributing Maxima packages via
Quicklisp is probably too far out there at present, and instead we
should focus our efforts on just copying the code into maxima/share.

> Docs: I wouldn't mind writing texinfo documentation probably, but it would
> be nice if the docs could be stand-alone and maybe cleverly integrated into
> the manual.

The Maxima reference manual is just a list of all the functions and
variables, with a short description and maybe some examples for each
one. If you don't already have something like that, it would be easy to
write.

> Test examples: some exist in the README, and there's a growing test suite (
> https://bitbucket.org/tarballs_are_good/cl-permutation/src/master/tests/).
> More work could be put into this.

OK, terrific.

> Closures: Some functions produce closures, but I don't think it's necessary
> to import all of CL-PERMUTATION, just a useful subset. I think the best
> route would be to make a wrapper package CL-PERMUTATION.MAXIMA or something
> that makes Maxima-friendly wrapped calls to CL-PERMUTATION, handling stuff
> like output data types, etc.

Well, I'd prefer to import all the user-visible functions, if possible.
Let's not rule out any at this point. I don't think the permutation
objects or closures will cause any problems, and if they do, I'd prefer
to fix the problem in Maxima.

best

Robert Dodier