[11] in mathematical software users group
Re: (MAPLE) Converting data from other applications
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Mar 18 14:54:00 1992
To: msug@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 92 14:53:14 EST
From: Reid M. Pinchback <reidmp@Athena.MIT.EDU>
>What about a more general problem which we've talked about
>over here: MACSYMA - Mathematica - Maple translators.
>Even partial translations would be useful, especially from
>MACSYMA to Mathematica.
Actually, I'd say there are 2 different general problems here...
1. Converting program code between different comp. algebra
packages.
2. Dealing with arbitrary input or output data formats.
Since Maple doesn't have a way to read data in arbitrary data formats,
the distinction isn't as clear. You have to write programs to take the
arbitrary data formats and convert them into assignment statements (or
into Maple native ".m" format) to use the data in Maple. I wonder if
the next release (5.1 or 5.2?) will address this...
As far as converting between Maple/Mathematica/Macsyma, this should be
do-able... the Maple documentation publishes the grammar for Maple,
so if the same is available for Macsyma and Mathematica then you
would just need to come up with the appropriate attribute grammars for
the parsers. There wouldn't even be much AI-ishness to the process,
since I think comp. algebra languages tend to have a lot of consistency
between syntactic and semantic interpretations. I would think it would
be harder to convert between Fortran and Cobol, for example, than it would
between Maple and Mathematica (ignoring issues of user interface, of course!).
-----------
Reid M. Pinchback
Faculty Liaison
Academic Computing Services, MIT
