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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Mathematics with koffice
From:       Ulrich Kuettler <ulrich.kuettler () mailbox ! tu-dresden ! de>
Date:       2003-03-16 9:53:47
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On Friday 14 March 2003 21:13, Claus O. Wilke wrote:
> Clearly everybody will have a different opinion on what is the best
> backend. Therefore, it would probably be good to keep the architecture
> open, so that it is possible to use different backends. As an example, look
> at the texmacs project (http://www.texmacs.org/), which allows you to use a
> variety of different free and proprietary computer algebra systems.
>

Hmm. texmacs is an interesting project. But as far as I can see texmacs acts 
as shell for various algebra systems. That is the user still interacts with a 
specific system and has to know its syntax. My aim is to completely hide the 
backend. This way an occasional user does not need to know who does the 
numerics. So the chosen backend should not really matter. But this approach 
also forces a real tight integration. Currently I link octave's libraries and 
use their objects directly. There is no easy way to switch to another 
backend.

I don't claim this approach gives everything to everybody. I don't even claim 
that it's superior to texmacs's approach. But I think it's more natural from 
the koffice point of view.

The flexibility of texmacs bases on the powerful builtin script language. This 
is something I'd love to see in koffice, too. Maybe a good script language 
could allow both an open architecture with tight integration. But there is no 
such language yet.


Greetings,
Uli

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