From: Serge Taylor
Subject: Mathematica from common lisp?
Date: Wed, 20 May 1992 19:08:33 +0000
Message-ID: <Ue6eClu00W0cQ3MFIq@andrew.cmu.edu>

Has anyone had any experience trying to call Mathematica from
within common lisp?  I know that the unix user's guide for Mathematica 2.0
says that it's possible via MathLink....But has anyone in this community
actually done it?

Serge Taylor

From: Philip Greenspun
Subject: Re: Mathematica from common lisp?
Date: Sat, 23 May 1992 03:59:30 +0000
Message-ID: <PHILG.92May22235930@orion.ai.mit.edu>

In article <··················@andrew.cmu.edu> ·····@andrew.cmu.edu (Serge Taylor) writes:

   Has anyone had any experience trying to call Mathematica from
   within common lisp?  I know that the unix user's guide for Mathematica 2.0
   says that it's possible via MathLink....But has anyone in this community
   actually done it?

I've tried calling Mathematica from Mathematica and it does one of the
following:

1) run out of memory and crash

2) crunch for three minutes trying to solve a trivial problem that an
MIT freshman could do in 30 seconds.  What does Mathematica return?
The empty set.

Maple works a lot better.  So did Macsyma back in the mid-1970s on a
PDP-10!

Philip Greenspun
MIT AI Lab

Here is some Lisp code that you can use to replace Mathematica:

1)  (defun foo () (cons (foo)))

2)  (defun bar () (sleep (* 3 60)) nil)