--- Daniel Lemire <lemire@ondelette.com> wrote:
> Good day,
>
> There is a package for Macsyma that seem very interesting to me in
> that it "simplifies" expressions in a way that seem much more
natural
> to me. (I think I've complained enough in the past about some of the
> shortcomings of Maxima.)
>
> http://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/computer-algebra/
>
> Could this be ever used with Maxima?
I just tried it in maxima 5.6 with gcl, and format seems to load and
function OK, but the demo file doesn't and some of the other stuff
doen't either. For format you have to comment and uncomment some stuff
in a couple of files - he mentions this in the README.
Not so sure about clisp or cmucl - tried it on a clisp build I have,
but it failed with an error about printing an ERROR message. This
could be due to my bizarre build at the moment, so we should probably
wait for 5.9 before we really go to work on it, but I agree it looks
very interesting.
If you mean including it in the Maxima package itself, I'd say we
should check with the author to be sure it's OK with him, and then have
a few people debug it and put it through it's paces. The website seems
to indicate that format was produced as the product of the National
Institute of Standards and Technology, and is thus not subject to
copyright, but I'll send him an email anyway.
> BTW some of you might be interested in noting that I went from "what
> the h*ll is this piece of cr*p" to using Maxima exclusively for my
> Computer Algebra needs (which are modest for the time being, but
> still).
Not bad! (Also highlights why documentation is so important.)
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