AsteR and Axiom

[Jason White <jason@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Axiom is a large symbolic algebra system packaged for Debian and possibly
other Linux distributions, which I discovered several years ago after reading
the project announcement. It was originally developed by IBM Research, then
commercialized, and finally released as free and open-source software. When I
investigated its accessibility, I discovered it could generate output in TeX
format.

Drawing upon Raman's code for connecting AsteR to the Emacs calculator, it was
easy enough to write a simple function to extract the last Axiom answer from a
shell buffer and render it in AsteR.

The session looks like this:

(1) -> )set output algebra off
(1) -> )set output tex on
(1) -> integrate(x^2,x)

$$
{ \frac{1}{3}} \  {x^3}
\leqno(1)
$$

                                            Type: Polynomial Fraction Integer
(2) ->

The default output format uses a spatial representation of the notation which
isn't very accessible in my opinion.

I'm not doing any mathematical work and I don't need this; I just thought it
would be a fun exercise at the beginning of my path to learning Lisp and
developing programming skills by working with AsteR and Emacspeak.

If anyone writes or has written an Emacs mode for Axiom there will be more
possibilities, and obviously the above can be extended in various ways.

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