Previous: Writing Programs in CL for Maxima Up: Writing Programs in CL for Maxima Next: Interfacing to MAXIMA
To achieve a computational objective a program can be written either to run at the maxima top level or at the underlying CL level. The former amounts to writing a program in the maxima language and executed at the maxima top level where maxima commands are given. The latter allows you to deal with lisp level facilities of maxima and to deal directly with low-level data representations and lisp structures. This is our topic here.
Several things make writing a CL program to run under MAXIMA different from just writing a straight CL program: (a) Interfacing your program with MAXIMA, (b) dealing with established maxima data representations for integer, fraction, matrix, polynomial, rational function, and other general mathematical expressions, (c) making calls to existing maxima code. We will address each in turn. With these you can program at a much higher level than most, if not all, programming environments. Imaging you can produce a symbolic determinant with a single CL-level call.