Re: [Maxima-discuss] Who is maintaining the emacs lisp code, e.g. dbl.el?

[Peter T. <pto...@gm...>]

I am a retired research physicist who uses a screen reader as well as a braile display.

 

I first used Maxima in the early 80’s by logging into a mainframe at M.I.T. from Rochester, NY.  At that time I had a bit of vision and magnified the display from my terminal to interact with the mainframe computer.

 

Years later, I had very little useful vision and started to use Maple on a Windows PC for mathematical calculations.  I used a screen reader and a braille display at the time.  This worked very well since the UI of Maple allowed me to easily scroll backward in the history buffer to view past results and/or very long output.

 

Now I am trying to see how to work with maxima and a screen reader and finding there are many solutions, some more complex than others, and some not accessible.  I would like to see this make more accessible and turnkey for upcoming students who are blind.  This could be an enabling tool.

 

Unfortunately I have never used emacs and know very little about it.  I don’t know how mainstream it is these days or what people generally use it for.  Maybe I need to hunt down some info.

 

Anyway, progress is often made one small step at a time.  At least if developers are aware of some of the issues they might have a shot at addressing them.

 

--Pete

 

 

 

 

From: Richard Fateman [mailto:fa...@be...] 
Sent: Friday, September 8, 2017 9:56 AM
To: Rocky Bernstein <ro...@gn...>
Cc: Peter Torpey <pto...@gm...>; <max...@li...> <max...@li...>
Subject: Re: [Maxima-discuss] Who is maintaining the emacs lisp code, e.g. dbl.el?

 

On 9/7/2017 5:01 PM, Rocky Bernstein wrote:

Comments in line.

 

On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 4:25 PM, Richard Fateman <fa...@be... <mailto:fa...@be...> > wrote:

If you are willing to use emacs, 

 

What does this mean?  It sounds like people who use maxima have a problem using emacs? Clearly  William F. Schelter 

didn't feel that was an obstacle in 2011 or else he wouldn't have worked on the Elisp code. So what's changed? 

There have been a number of projects to make emacs accessible (for people
who are vision impaired). A programmer may or may not be willing to learn
 to use one of them (e.g. the one by T.V. Raman).

A mathematician who is used to reading via a screen-reading program
may not need a text editor and may not be willing to learn one in order
to access Maxima.

A fully-sighted mathematician or other user of Maxima
 who is used to reading/writing text
on a computer may not be willing to learn emacs;  this is probably
the vast majority of users.  Indeed, I use emacs myself,
but usually use wxmaxima to access Maxima.

Bill Schelter was a programmer and mathematician who clearly
used emacs and similar programs. He had no vision impairment.
He also liked to build tools on conventional workstations as
well as Lisp machines.





 

 

then the very simplest interface -- the one I use sometimes -- entirely without
special emacs macros etc, can be run in windows/emacs.
  This is useful to me if I want to
record the total interaction, including interspersed lisp or debugging etc, without any "user interface"
that requires the use of menus, or tries to display images.

I start up emacs
I start a windows shell command buffer by typing
esc x  shell

 

If this is what you do, then you are running what is called a "comint shell", 

OK, thanks  I now have a name for it :)



and that's what realgud uses. Ok. So I'll add a +1 for don't bother with dbl.el or sshell.el  

If the goal is to make it easy to (say) insert breakpoints in lisp or maxima code
in the same way as in (say)  gdb, then it may not be something people are
looking for.

I've used gdb  (fortunately not recently)  but I doubt that  inserting
a breakpoint in lisp or Maxima code is a technique that is popular.
I can't recall ever doing this in decades, myself.

  Using trace, or
inserting the occasional print statement is most common for me.
This doesn't require much of an assist from an editor,  though
I suppose  trace(foo) could be done by highlighting "foo" and
pulling down a menu to say "trace".  I guess wxmaxima could
do this. Also untrace,  untrace() which would untrace everything.
I'd prefer to keep my fingers on the keyboard though :).

I think of most effective programming in Maxima (also Lisp) as collections
of rather short procedures --- maybe 8 lines, maximum.
This may be different from the way many people write in
C, Java, etc.  (Although someone who learns Lisp may
then change style and write much shorter programs in C etc.)

 I don't know how
effective SLIME is in covering over the different Lisp's formats
of backtraces and such.

RJF