[Mupad-combinat-users] *-Combinat: MuPAD-Combinat join forces with Sage

[Nicolas M. T. <Nic...@u-...>]

	Dear MuPAD-Combinat developers and users,

After months of discussions and experiments, it was time to draw the
conclusion: there is an enthusiastic consensus to go for it, and join
forces with the exciting Sage project!

The transition is going to be a massive investment: seven years of
hard work from all of us to port over! But if we share again the
efforts we can do it, and even do it relatively quickly. We gained a
lot of experience since 2000: most of the design is now pretty clear
(hem ... at least in our heads), which should make the transition much
quicker. Mike Hansen by himself did the amazing job of translating 25%
of our code in one year!

We should see this as a great opportunity to review thoroughly all our
code: any software needs a complete rewrite from time to time. And in
the long run, there is a lot to gain:

 - We will for the first time have a bottom-up open-source environment
   for algebraic combinatorics! Finally!

 - We will join a much larger community of enthusiastic
   developers: Mike, Dan^2, Justin, Kurt, Gregg, ...

 - We won't have to worry anymore about releases, compilation,
   portability, ...  Thanks Michael for relieving us from this!

 - We will have under our fingertips all the blazingly fast
   specialized libraries we have always dreamed of (linbox, singular,
   ...), and all the power of a widely used general purpose language.
   Think optimized data structures, string or IPC libraries, cython ...

 - No more broken emacs mode, hairy doc compilations :-)

The bottom line is: more time for research, which is our primary goal.


In the coming days, we will start building a roadmap by posting
tickets on Sage trac for the features we want to port.

Some pointers:
 - http://mupad-combinat.sourceforge.net/Wiki/Sage
 - http://wiki.sagemath.org/combinat/
 - http://sagetrac.org/sage_trac/milestone/sage-combinat/

Finally, we would like to take this occasion to thank the MuPAD
developers for their continuous support throughout the years of our
fruitful collaboration with them. We owe it to them to leave the
MuPAD-Combinat code in a good state so that they can integrate as much
as possible into the MuPAD library. We will really appreciate your
help for the final stable release!

				Florent and Nicolas
-- 
Nicolas M. Thiery "Isil" <nt...@us...>
http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/