I view Maxima speed purely from a user's point of view.
Maxima appears much slower than Maple in timing
for the following programline:
sum(i,i,1,1000000);
Obviously Maple has taken a well-known shortcut.
Maxima is also slower than Macsyma in this quarter.
But as a user, I think the coolest feature of Maxima is
its lower window where one could access an HTML
file and test execute embedded Maxima programlines.
This feature could be exploited by authors of online
eBOOKs on mathematics. I am not aware of the
presence of this feature in Macsyma and Maple.
HuenYK
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