On Thu, 10 Jan 2002 dan.stanger@ieee.org wrote:
> I have also written to the author of CGBLisp, a grobner basis system
> written in lisp, and he has a prototype interface to maxima.
> I think that any grobner code that we start now should be written
> in maxima, so that if we change the underlying implementation,
> the work is still usable.
This adresses a general question I have. Should packages generally be
written in CL or in Maxima? I wrote for testing purposes the
Robinson-Schensted-Knuth correspondence in Mathematica, Maxima, and GCL.
After compiling, the maxima code was faster than MMA by a factor of two,
but the lisp code was faster by a factor of eight (!). (Well, not very
thoroughly tested, though)
Should we really write packages for which speed is an issue and for which
not much maxima stuff is needed in the maxima language? Of course, a
package written in lisp should run on all lisps that maxima supports, but
this is probably rarely a problem (or isn't it?)
Martin