I'm delighted this exists as all too many students have used Mathematica in their education and now can't afford it. Yet I'm always wondering why one would wr

I'm delighted this exists as all too many students have used Mathematica in their education and now can't afford it. Yet I'm always wondering why one would write an interpreter for something like this. I've used Maxima much longer than Mathematica has existed. There's no Maxima interpreter or compiler. It's just a read table in Common Lisp. So you're really using CL without needing to know that and some CLs, e.g. SBCL, are extraordinarily efficient. Doing such a thing for other SW tools also gives you seemless interop!