[GAP Forum] Front end for GAP

[Yevgen Muntyan]

David Joyner wrote:

> I'm curious what work you are doing which involves GAP and python...
> I am learning python myself...

This is some group theory stuff, mixed with dynamic systems theory. I need
to draw certain graphs, calculate spectra of certain matrices, and draw 
those
spectra. At the moment I'm using scilab for this, but it's pretty 
inconvenient -
I just starting scilab using Exec function; plus scilab can't write 
graphs as I want.
So I am writing a graphics library and python module for it, and I will 
glue all of
this together using ggap (there already exist python modules for numeric
calculations).
Also I am going to write some dialogs for my professor, so that he can 
use GAP -
teaching him to use command line is more difficult :)
You know, python is very powerful and easily extendable, so you can do 
different
things using it - work with databases, internet, or create gui things, etc.

You already can do things like: write a function in gap which opens a 
dialog,
that dialog does something, and pastes something into the gap console. In
next version I will make some demo of this, something like what xgap does.

> Since you asked, I actually have at least 3 versions of GAP on this PC.
> (A CVS 64-bit-compiled version, a CVS 32-bit-compiled version,
> and an "old" version ie one that anyone can download from the web.)
> I prefer that ggap have a ".ggaprc file" so that I can tell ggap which
> gap script I want it to load. Is that possible?

Yes, you can set how to start GAP in Preferences dialog; ggap stores its 
settings
in ~/.ggaprc file. You can specify rc file using -f command line option, 
e.g.
'ggap -f some_other_rc'.
This works if you compiled ggap with gtk of version 2.6 or newer 
(implementation
details, you know). Actually I didn't think someone will want to use 
command line
options. To test if it works, do 'ggap --help'; if it says something, 
everything
is fine, otherwise it can't read command line options.

I will make a command line option specifying how to start gap, like
ggap -g "my_favorite_gap -blah -blah". Or it's better to allow multiple gap
command line setting, so you choose it in menu or something? What do
you think?

> Also, the gap script takes a large number of arguments - you can even 
> load
> gap using a workspace. Does ggap allow this?

Once I was thinking to add option of loading workspace, it's still in the
Preferences dialog (though it doesn't do anything). Do you think it 
would be
useful? This is part of a big problem, actually. I can easily start gap 
from my
program in any way I wish, but it's hard to design gui for this. And I 
don't want
to put million things which are hard to use or not used at all in the 
program.

Yevgen