redcas - R interface to REDUCE

redcas version 0.2.1 provides

• the ability to start an interactive REDUCE session, send REDUCE commands to the session, retrieve and format the output of those commands and close the session. Any REDUCE command which does not require user interaction may be executed and the output is returned as a character vector or list of character vectors.

  <li>a direct interface to any REDUCE prefix operator (function) which simply returns
      the output as (lists of) character vectors without any further processing.
  
  <li>direct intefaces to the REDUCE features for solving systems of equations,
      ordinary differential equations, factorizing numbers and polynomials and
      conversion to LaTeX (redSolve, odesolve, factorize, R2latex/redLatex). These
      convert output to suitable R objects.
  
  <li>utility functions for converting REDUCE objects to corresponding R objects and for
  entering REDUCE code without having to use quotes.

System Requirements

In order to use redcas on Linux either the CSL or PSL dialect must be installed and in the search path. For MacOS, only CSL is available. There are other options besides the search path for finding the REDUCE executable - see the documentation for redStart() for details.

REDUCE is available from https://reduce-algebra.sourceforge.io. On Linux redcas has been tested with the snapshot versions 7335 and 6860 and the patched version 7131 using R 4.6.1 and 4.5.3. On MacOS, both Intel and Arm with snapshots 6866 and 6658.

Installation

Installation is done in the usual way:

install.packages("redcas")

Tests can be run using either R CMD check on the package tar.gz or by installing the tests and using tools::testInstalledPackage. In order to install the tests add the argument INSTALL_opts=c(“–install-tests”) to install.packages.

redcas can be installed even if there is no REDUCE installation.

Testing

The package redcas comes with more than 800 tests. Approximately one third of the tests require no REDUCE installation. Tests requiring REDUCE are skipped if no REDUCE executable is found. Some of these tests execute for both CSL and PSL, so if only one of these is present a larger number of tests will be skipped. Tests can be run from R using

library(tools)
testInstalledPackage("redcas") or from the command line using R CMD check redcas_i.j.k.tar.gz where i.j.k is the redcas version.

A summary of the test results are contained in the file 99-test-results.Rout in the test output directory. If any tests fail, this file will be named 99-test-results.Rout.failed