mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[michael graffam <address@hidden>]

--- Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden> 
>This would be a *very* valuable contribution, also
>because during discussions on a (private :^( ) RedHat
>mailing list, we were told that the probablilty of
>TeXmacs being included into the standard distribution
>would significantly grow if we had a good interface
>with GNU Octave.

Interfacing TeXmacs with Octave is pretty easy. 

Edit ~/.octaverc and add the lines:

if (length(getenv("TEXMACS_PATH")) > 0)
        PS1="\\002channel:prompt\\005octave> \\005";
endif

And launch octave with the following script:

#!/bin/bash
echo -ne "\002verbatim:"
octave -v
exec octave -qi

We could also launch Octave by pointing it to a custom
TeXmacs-only init script which loads the user's 
.octaverc as normal, and then executes our code. This
would prevent the user from needing to edit their 
.octaverc file. 

Also, it would be good for TeXmacs to set an
environment variable TEXMACS_RUNNING or something that
can be used to certify that we are talking to TeXmacs
.. the existence of TEXMACS_PATH doesn't strictly
imply
this. I could do it in the script before I launch
Octave, but this really ought to be standardized by
TeXmacs itself. 

> The easiest solution would be to convince to the
> Octave maintainers to support a --texmacs option and
> to include the necessary code directly into Octave. 

I'm sure they'd be happy to include any code that we
could provide. They just aren't about to code the
interface themselves. Thats ok. I'll get to it
eventually, I'm sure. 

What kind of stuff would people out there in TeXmacs
land like to see in their Octave interface anyhow? 

* Pretty-printed matrices and polynomials are a given
* Execute Scheme expressions

I don't know how I'm going to handle online
documentation yet. That is something that will
probably
need support directly in Octave. 

How might I allow Octave to utilize Yacas? Anyone have
any ideas? If we could provide an Octave symbolic
toolboox by connecting to Yacas we'd turn a lot of
heads in the Octave crowd, and a --texmacs option to
Octave would be taken a lot more seriously. 

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