interfacing mathematics

[John W. Eaton]

On  9-Mar-1999, Chad Cunningham <address@hidden> wrote:

| Hi everyone, I'm working on ways to put math on the web. I do a lot of
| web based programming in PHP, which of course doesn't handle any
| advanced mathematics. What I'm considering doing is trying to somehow
| add a native inteface to a mathematics package to php so as to avoid the
| overhead of running an external program or CGI. It would probably be
| good to do this with Mathematica using the MathLink libraries, but I
| have a feeling the licensing would be prohibitive. Several people have
| pointed me at octave. Is there a C API Library available for octave? All
| I would really need to do is write wrapper functions in the PHP API. Has
| anyone done anything like this before?

If you want to embed Octave in another application, it should be
possible.  The top-level file (octave.cc) is small.  Most of the
functionality is contained in a set of libraries.  You would have to
figure out how to do it from reading the source though.

jwe