mathicsscript 1.1.2

A general-purpose computer algebra system.

mathicsscript is a command-line interface to Mathics.

See the screenshot directory for a description and another example.

Features

• GNU Readline terminal interaction. This includes

  • saving command history between sessions.

  • variable completion, even for symbol names like \[Sigma]

  • limited ESC keyboard input; for example esc p esc is π

• Syntax highlighting using pygments.

• Automatic detection of light or dark terminal background color.

Installing

To install, run

$ make install

To install from git sources so that you run from the git source tree:

$ make develop

Why not IPython via Jupyter?

There will always be a need for simple terminal-like interaction. Although there is IPython support via Jupyter all of this is pretty heavy-weight. To code to this a developer needs to code write a kernel, and use a wire protocol and this adds complexity not only for the person developing this package, but also for the user who needs to load the extra layers that aren’t used. And when something goes wrong, it is harder to track down problems.