[GiNaC-devel] AsyForGiNaC - an output extension producing Asymptote files

[Jens Vollinga]

Dear Vladimir,

Vladimir Kisil schrieb:
>>>>>> "JV" == Jens Vollinga <vollinga at physik.uni-wuppertal.de> writes:
>     JV> GiNaC will _never_ ever DRAW things (unless we link it against
>     JV> OpenGL or something similar ...). 
> 	
> 	Currently I can use pyGinac interactively to feed through a pipe
>   drawing command to Asymptote and see immediately the result in a GV
>   window, no need to link against any graphic library, popen() is
>   sufficient from GiNaC and Asy does the rest.

my words ...  GiNaC never draws anything :-)

>     JV> Then I have some light concerns about a continuous maintenance
>     JV> of that additional code (we had a similar issue with printing in
>     JV> python format in the past IIRC), 
> 	...
>     JV> future. Somebody will have to take care of that, continuously.
> 
> 	This is why I also ad vacating only straightforward functionality in
>   the core GiNaC with a possibility to have more drawing (sorry,
>   printing ;-) methods possibly in a separate library in the anticipated
>   Contrib storage.

Even if you don't appreciate the difference between drawing and printing 
yet ;-), it is significant: using all that is described in section 6.3.3 
of the manual, no extra code needs to be added to GiNaC then. It could 
(and probably will) be added to GiNaC, because it spares the user some 
extra work, but that's the ONLY reason! The statement put forward in the 
documentation of AsyForGiNaC and in some emails that the output quality 
or that the possible drawing capabilities can only be increased if the 
GiNaC classes are altered is not true.

Maybe you don't agree with this yet, or maybe I oversee something 
important, but at the moment I think the discussion is at a dead end, 
since either we agree on some important points (printing in Asymptote 
format is useful and code can be added to GiNaC), or we disagree but the 
issue can only be decided with further coding efforts (to explicitly and 
clearly demonstrate the case).

Regards,
Jens