SageMath and Emacs

[Rahguzar <rahguzar@zohomail.eu>]

Dear Emacs developers,

I want to ask opinions about including support for SageMath in Emacs or
GNU ELPA.

SageMath is a niche software but I think the niche is a very important
one. It is also the best computer algebra system which is also free
software and hence important to advance free software in a field
dominated proprietary software. (This dominance is especially sad since
proprietary software is a very shaky foundation for scientific
research.)

The SageMath project project provides Emacs modes both for source files
and repl. They code can be found at
https://github.com/sagemath/sage-shell-mode

It is a large code base but looking at it a year or so ago, I realized
that most of the code was implementing functionality that is by now
included in the python.el in Emacs. SageMath is a thin wrapper around Python
and as a result basic support for it can be provided by setting some
variables provided by python.el appropriately.

I wrote such a wrapper around python.el which is hosted at
https://codeberg.org/rahguzar/sage-mode

There is more code there than needed because I wanted to change some
behaviors of python.el but now I think those deviations should be
removed. As a result I think basic functionality can be provided by
addition of 200-300 lines in python.el (or a separate file requiring
it). If there is an interest in providing out of box support for
SageMath I can prepare such a patch.

I have been meaning to send this email for a while but never came around
to it. I am sending this now because I saw Eli's message about a pretest
for Emacs 30 being imminent. It might be already too late for Emacs 30
but if the pretest is a week or two away there might be time.

If inclusion in Emacs core is not considered a good option, I will like
to contribute support to ELPA. I would like to hear opinions of the
people maintaining the current SageMath support and opened an issue at
https://github.com/sagemath/sage-shell-mode/issues/80 but I haven't
heard from them (it has only been a few days).

Thanks,
Rahguzar