Hello > Sure, this is true. It is certainly true of computer algebra systems > where (for example) relative large amounts of effort are devoted to > parts of systems which are pretty much doomed to be of almost no use > except demonstrations. Simple example: almost no one other than > freshman calculus students are interested in doing symbolic indefinite > integrals, and even they are not interested in the decision procedure > for integration in finite terms in terms of elementary functions. The > applications are for definite integrals, which have for many many
I tend to disagree on this. In my opinion, you tend to consider data analysis the only "application", but design and synthesis are another very important area. There, data crunching is far less important, and symbolic manipulations are much more important, to understand the design trade offs. So, for my everyday work (as an engineer, so very application oriented) I consider symbolic management (look in this group how often I do ask for symbolic indefinite integration, symbolic laplace/fourier transforms, etc) at least as important as numerical data analysis. > There are quite a few people now improving Maxima without rewriting > it in python. There is material in the open literature that suggests > a total redesign might cure some problems. I've written some of it. > So far as I know, the Sage people are not aware of these issues. They > might even be in the parts that are not needed by current users and so > would be left out, much to the detriment of future directions of > growth. > > A reason for (doing something like rewriting Maxima in python) might > be what you suggest below, sort of. > > (e) A complete redesign of a computer algebra system with facilities > like those in Maxima, from top to bottom is long overdue. We propose > to do this. We want to use Python because, uh, because we think uh, > high school students know Python? And Lisp is bad for computer > algebra. See how hard it was to use in Maxima, Reduce, Jacal, > Axiom, ... > [Maple and Mathematica are, I think, written in C extended in some > ways]. > I would like to kindly ask you to point out the reasons for which Maxima would take advantage from a complete redesign, so that these points can be already taken as the starting points of the new CAS. I'm sure you can give a lot of good (potentially constructive) advices, and I'm sure people here are really willing to listen for them. Regards Maurizio --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
