How come there are so many bugs in XMaxima?

Interesting question.

Here are a few thoughts..

  1. When a system is running on one computer at one place,
it is easier to debug it.  When it has to run "portably" on
numerous different systems with different non-standard feature
sets, bugs can appear. Thus the "maxima" effort has revealed
bugs that were not an issue on the PDP-10 Maclisp system, or
on the lisp machine version.

  2. The commercial version of Macsyma has many more features
and fewer bugs. Maybe people are referring to that.

  3. There are some issues of design as well. While there are
errors in design  (or at least differences of opinion), it
is sometimes the case that the choice made by Macsyma was
"try to get it right"  and not "hardly anyone will notice
this shortcut and and it is usually right". In some cases
the other systems tried shortcuts.  My guess is that Axiom
has even fewer bugs, but I have not tried it in many years.

RJF



synthespian wrote:

> Hi-
> 
> 	Please take no offense in my questioning this, I recognise
> people work hard on Maxima.
>         However, I read that Maxima was one of the most bug-free CAS
> amongst the rest, since it was made since 1968. Has there been a lot
> of code change?
> 	Are these bugs we see here from a recoding?
> 	
> 	Regs
> 	Henry
> 	synthespian@uol.com.br
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