Dear Vladimir, On Fri, 21 Apr 2006, Vladimir Kisil wrote:
With so many exciting activity going around GiNaC already I wish to propose even more. Why do not let GiNaC classes to visualise themselves?
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I think it would be worth to integrate GiNaC with Asymptote. As a start I think to add a method .asy() to the GiNaC::basic which simply put a label at specific position with LaTeX representation of the object. For functions it would be rewritten by a method which try to draw its graph (if this is possible).
If the general perception is that this is worthy I may try to produce an initial patch.
I think I do not really understand very well in what cases this would be useful. The point of computer algebra is to be able to handle very large expressions, including ones that one wouldn't want to see printed and/or visualized. If I understand correctly, the use of interfacing with Asymptote would be to e.g., print labels that are formulas. However, in order to be readable these need to be rather small. In that case using (La)TeX gives much more control over the appearance of the formulas. However, imagine the result of a very complicated calculation is x-y and that result would need to occur somewhere in a figure. Fine as such but in that case I would almost always like to control how this result appears precisely. E.g. I might prefer to see x-y instead of -y+x. It becomes even worse if one imagines fractions. I generally very much prefer to see x/y in printing than y^(-1)*x. Besides, what if it turns out that this was coded in such a way that a new version of GiNaC yields a much more complicated representation of x-y, one that is to big to be contained in the figure. This would mean that the user needs, in order to regenerate his image, to debug his symbolic calculation. Not so much fun .... Having the result in (La)TeX would be much more stable. Best, Chris