9. Too little care for rigor. It is notoriously easy to find "bugs" in algorithms for symbolic computation. To make matters worse, these errors are often regarded as of no significance by their authors, who plead that the result returned is true "except on a set of measure zero", without explicitly naming the set involved. The careful determination, nay, even proof, of precisely which conditions under which a result is true is essential for building the structure of mathematics so that one can depend on it. The QED system will support the development of symbolic algebra programs in which formal proofs of correctness of derivations are provided, along with the precise statement of conditions under which the results are true.
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