BLAD integration in Sage

This wiki page is about the integration of the Bibliothèques Lilloises d'Algèbre Différentielle in Sage.

It will in particular help organize the coding sprint on December 13th.

Here is a list of tasks; please sign in to the task you would want to participate to.

Before December 13th:

• Have Sage 4.7.2 installed on everyone's laptop, together with the usual developers tools.

  Test: the following command (creating a new branch for blad's development within Sage) should work:

  sage -b blad

• For those planning to do development: get acquainted with the version control system Mercurial.

  See: Mercurial Tutorial

• For everyone: get acquainted with Sage's workflow, and in particular Sage's ticket server

• Build/choose a couple examples, from trivial to complex, showing how libBLAD is to be called from C, and the equivalent call from Maple

  • François?

• Choose a sample of calculations involving BLAD of increasing complexity that would be of interest in applications, and in particular in control theory

On December 13th:

• Quick demo of BLAD, from C and Maple

  • François

• Sketch of the would-be high level user interface

  • Everybody

• For everyone: get a trac account. That will be easiest on December 13th, since Nicolas can create them. Otherwise you can request one right away as described above. Once you have such an account, you can edit this wiki.

• Create a ticket for the integration of BLAD in Sage.

• Create other tickets as appropriate describing the related projects of the participants.

• Write down a test file and a tutorial on using BLAD from Sage, in ReST (Sage's and Python's documentation & tests format), taking inspiration from Maple's documentation.

  Expand it with a section ``BLAD in control theory'' with the examples above.

  System Message: WARNING/2 (<string>, line 52); backlink

  Inline literal start-string without end-string.

  • ??? with help from Florent

  See also:

  • Sage developers's guide on writing documentation http://www.sagemath.org/doc/developer/conventions.html#documentation-strings
  • Quick introduction to ReST http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/rst/quickref.html

• Build a Sage package (aka spkg) allowing for the installation of libBLAD in the Sage installation

  This should be straightforward since BLAD uses the standard autotools (1/2 hour to get a prototype?).

  • François, Nicolas, ...

  See also:

  • The developers guide
  • An example of spkg from #10333

• Translate (some of) the C examples to Cython, and call them from Sage (without input/output)

  • François, Nicolas, ...

• Low level interface: work progressively on date conversions Sage<->C, so that the input and output for the C examples can be respectively specified and retrieved from Sage's command line (in whatever format)

  • François, Nicolas, ...

  See also:

  • Cython's web site http://cython.org/
  • Cython's basic tutorial http://docs.cython.org/src/userguide/tutorial.html
  • Sage with Cython tutorial http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2010/11/getting-started-with-cython.html

• Write the high level interface (parents, categories, ...)

• Bind together the high and low level interfaces

• Call it a day :-)