Re: Using PARI as a library

[Ilya Zakharevich <ilya@Math.Berkeley.EDU>]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2003 at 08:53:45AM +0100, Alberto Simões/EPL wrote:
> Hello
> 
> We are developing a tool for Gnome which aims to be (well, to dream is
> free) a Mathematica clone. Of course we know how to program Gtk/Gnome,
> write parsers, evaluate formulae... but we dont have any knowledge of
> algebric/symbolic computation.
> 
> So, we were looking for a library which could do this for us. I
> downloaded Pari/GP, and it seems a brilliant application... but
> as I read (well, looked to it) the documentation, it seems not so
> easy like that to use Pari library.
> 
> Can anybody point if it can be feasible, or should we adopt GP and
> only do a GUI frontend? (well... I would like to maintain my own
> language and parser...)

Technically feasible.  At least I did it.  ;-) See Pari.xs of
Math::Pari for one possible implementation.

But I knew a *lot* about both Perl and PARI, and I possessed
techinical means to change both of them until the target became
feasible.  ;-)  Of course, stack manipulation may be an obstacle.

I think the (existing) C++ wrapper for PARI may be an easier place to
start.  You should get much worse performance than programming bare
PARI, but the performance should not be your *first* priority, right?

Hope this helps,
Ilya