RFP: fricas -- computer algebra system

[Riccardo GUIDA]

Hi to all Debian Science maintainers

I've read on the wiki [1] that you accept package proposals, so I shameless take the liberty...

It would be nice to have FriCAS distributed by Debian! Official RFP here: [2].

FriCAS is a computer algebra system, forked in 2007 from Axiom, see [3] for a short history. The basic goal of FriCAS is to create a free, advanced world-class CAS.

Axiom is currently packaged in Debian distribution, FriCAS is not.

Debian CAS users would appreciate having FriCAS distributed in Debian because nowadays Axiom and FriCAS have different, complementary priorities:
the former emphasizes documentation and literal programming, the latter fast-development and active code debugging.

Some details:

Axiom/FriCAS mathematical capabilities rely on a strongly-typed high-level programming named SPAD (short for Scratchpad II). FriCAS also has some support for Aldor, which roughly speaking is an evolved version of SPAD.

SPAD supports generic mathematical programming/polymorphism via the notion of categories (roughly speaking abstract classes). In practice this means that in Axiom/FriCAS if you implement a mathematical algorithm for, say, a ring (set with +,* and a few intuitive properties) the (compiled) algorithm will be available to all existing and future types satisfying the condition of being a ring.

While the bulk  codeground (mainly lisp and boot, a little C) is basically the same as Axiom, since 2007 there have been a lot of efforts in improving the SPAD part, (src/algebra), which implements the mathematical functionalities. At the moment about 30% of code in algebra has been added and a lot of bugs fixed [4].

Extracted from [5]:
"FriCAS uses lightweight development methodology.  Compared to Axiom
FriCAS is significantly restructured -- it is more portable and fixed
several defects.  FriCAS removed rather large unused parts (without
removing functionality).  It is expected that FriCAS will be much
easier to maintain than original Axiom.

FriCAS development goals are:

-- continue structural improvements
-- make it easier for external programs to interface with FriCAS
-- develop better user interface
-- support for using external mathematical routines from SPAD
-- developing improved SPAD compiler
-- add new mathematical algorithms"


Some additional information on FriCAS:

- FriCAS has recently reached the status of 'optional package' of Sagemath [6]

- At the moment of writing FriCAS has a rate of % 73.03 [26829 / 36735] solved integrals in the (Rubi-based) Computer algebra independent integration tests [7],
which is the highest score among all other open source CAS there tested.


Packaginginformation:

- Build information here [8]

- The developers recommend to use sbcl-lisp for compiling.

- Some debian builds already exist (and, they say, should work) for older versions of FriCAS [9]

- FriCAS is already distributed by Gentoo Linux [10].

Thanks for your time (and your support to open source & science).

Riccardo

[1]  https://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=890525
[3] http://fricas.sourceforge.net/history.html
[4] https://github.com/fricas/fricas/blob/master/ChangeLog
[5] https://github.com/fricas/fricas/blob/master/README
[6] https://git.sagemath.org/sage.git/commit?id=f8567ebfe1a7f690e069dff95f4ebcacc6b90aca
[7] https://www.12000.org/my_notes/CAS_integration_tests/reports/rubi_4_15_2/index.htm
[8] http://fricas.sourceforge.net/doc/INSTALL.txt
[9]
https://sourceforge.net/p/fricas/code/HEAD/tree/releases/1.3.1/debian/
http://sid.ethz.ch/debian/fricas/
[10] https://repology.org/metapackage/fricas/versions