Re: replacing Mathematica was: Polymorphic pretty printing

[Andrej Bauer <Andrej.Bauer@andrej.com>]

HENRIKSON, JEFFREY wrote:
>
> On the subject of evil plan, I would like to say: if you write yet
> another symbolic package, make sure to get the derivative notation
> right!

I do not wish to write yet another symbolic algebra system. I want to
have an enriched ocaml toplevel with ocaml as my "symbolic language".
Possibly I would use camlp4 to enrich syntax with notation for
finite sets.

Perhaps one day I would want to look at something like FreshML or
what Aleksandar Nanevski from CMU has been doing for his Ph.D. to get
some "symbolic" into ocaml.

But I definitely do not want to have a rewrite system. The world has seen
enough poorly designed "languages" for symbolic manipulation that are little
more than confused combinations of rewrite systems and BASIC.

Thanks for pointing to the MIT derivative algebra implementation. I will
have a look at it. My idea of derivation was rather that the differential
operator D is an operator on a suitable algebra. With rich enough types
in my programming language, it should be possible to implement D as an
honest function--no funny notation needed.

Best regards,

Andrej