A Study in the Integration of Computer Algebra Systems: Memory Management in a Maple–aldor Environment

We have undertaken to study the problems which arise in the tight coupling of computer algebra systems. By this we mean having multiple computer algebra systems share the same address space so that objects created by one system can be passed passed by reference in calls to another system. As an interesting practical problem, we have explored the case of using Aldor code from within the Maple system, allowing Aldor and Maple programs to share data and call each other. This allows Aldor to be used as a compiled extension language for Maple, and consequently provides Maple an efficient generic programming facility. This required creating an Enhanced External Function interface for Maple , which has been incorporated as part of the standard release of Maple since Maple 7. In this paper we describe the low-level memory management issues arising from this integration. The natural interface between Aldor domains and Maple modules shall be reported elsewhere.