I had an offline discussion with management at Texas Instruments about Derive. I'm concerned that this historically interesting piece of software is simply going to disappear once TI decides they no longer want to support the CAS business.
I have asked them to build a "deadman" clause into the handling of the Derive source code so it could be released when it was no longer of interest. The lisp source code is no longer used. All work is in C++. Unfortunately the end result of several months of discussion with TI was that the request for release and the request for a "deadman" clause were both refused. It seems to me that the calculator business will eventually die off. I have not used a calculator in many years. Given the falling price and increasing power of PCs, I can't help but believe that the days of the calculator are numbered. And, like Macsyma on Symbolics machines, Derive is going to disappear forever. It looks like we've lost another great CAS to the corporate blackhole. A similar fate for Mathematica or Maple will leave a huge hole in computational mathematics worldwide. Tim _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
