[SnapPea-planning] priorities

[Nathaniel Thurston]

If we're going to get this ambitious, I think it makes sense to  
rewrite the core in a modern language.  I'd favor either Haskell or  
Python (not knowing very much about either), as being friendlier to  
mathematicians who aren't experienced programmers.  Also, there's no  
special reason we can't have both -- we should have a reasonable  
separation of the various modules, and it's possible to write common  
library routines, some of which would handle the conversion between  
human-readable file and internal representation.

I forgot a priority #0 on the previous list -- document a list of  
SnapPea-related projects, with ideas about how to go about  
implementing them.

-- Nathaniel
On 28 Apr 2009, at 17:52, Bill Thurston wrote:

> So --- it's not obvious to me the extent to which it's better (in the
> long run) to separate the different aspects of geometry and topology,
> communicating perhaps by  human-legible and editable ascii files vs.
> the extent to which it's better to aim for a single integrated master
> program whose inner workings are more shielded.