Re: [Caml-list] Interactive technical computing

[Andrej Bauer <Andrej.Bauer@fmf.uni-lj.si>]

Jon Harrop wrote:
> I'd like to hear everyone's opinions on this as, it seems to me, we're sitting 
> on the foundations of a great technical computing system.

I would be very much interested in participating in an effort to develop 
an interactive environment for ocaml that surpases the currect toplevel.

I have in mind a toplevel that can be used *easily* as part of an 
application, has support for line-editing, fancy typesetting and 
graphics display. Intelligent pretty-printing would probably be a 
natural consequence of such desires (so that we graphics is just a fancy 
pretty printer).

As far as symbolic computation and manipulation of mathematical 
expressions is concerned: I am not sure that overloading operators and 
doing other kinds of violence to ocaml is the right way to go. It might 
be better to have instead a specific language for symbolic computation 
_on top_ of ocaml. The symbolic computation language would swallow the 
horrible and nasty notation that is used in mathematics, digest it, and 
pass it on to ocaml.

Best regards,

Andrej