mathicsscript 2.1.2

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.

• Entering and displaying Unicode symbols such as used for Pi or Rule arrows

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 protocol, a developer needs to write a kernel, and use a wire protocol. 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.

At the other end of the spectrum, if the dependencies of this package are too onerous and you want even simpler, lighter-weight terminal interaction _without_ and of the features mentioend above, use mathics which is distributed as part of the core Mathic3 package.