Dear Professor Fateman,
Dear Cliff,
Dear Colleagues,
Many thanks to Professor Fateman for all of his comments
and support, which may permit us to proceed with the
investigation of DOE-Macsyma's further support on differential
equations as is clear from the ODEAUX.MAC file already in
the distribution of 5.9.0 rc4. I believe his views are correct.
I also agree with Cliff's latest comments (nothing is wrong
there) and I hope Jim will do the same perhaps even in 5.9.1.
Many thanks also to Wolfgang, Stavros and Cliff for their
so precious help.
Trying to proceed, I would like to mention that I have in front
of mine a copy of the
DOE-Maxima Reference Manual
that Mike Clarkson released last September and I am
thankful to him too. In Section 9.6 of this manual the
possibilities of the ODE command are mentioned in a
great detail with respect to DOE-Maxima (based on
the corresponding manual for DOE-Macsyma of
course). From this section I tend to believe that the
ODE command has been a standard command of
DOE-Macsyma and even today the ODEAUX.MAC
package is present in Maxima 5.9.0, rc4. Of course,
this command is also mentioned in the
Maxima Manual
by William F. Schelter
>From the above package, the ODEAUX.MAC package,
I have got the impression that the following MAC
files have been omitted in the distributions of Maxima
(at least the recent ones), and, probably, this omission
can cease being present in the future. These files are
the following ones
ABEL, RICSOL, DIFFAC, LAPL, TRANS,
RICATI, HYPER, MANYT, SERIES, WHIT,
SCHMID, INTFAC, SINGS, TRAN, HYP,
REMOTE , KAMKE, ODE
plus some more I am not sure about. My question is
where I could be able to find these files in source form
so that they could be used as described in the DOE-Maxima
Reference manual and in the file ODEAUX.MAC. This is
my question and I would be grateful for any help by the
colleagues as well as any explanation of the strange message
in Maxima, at least 5.9.0 rc4 that (after DESCRIBE(ode))
- Function: ODE (equation,y,x)
This no longer exists in Maxima. The documentation is left here
for historical purposes.
I am really curious to know who wrote this message and when.
I am interested to have the ODE command restored in Maxima
in coincidence with both of its two Reference Manuals unless
some Copyright complaints have been raised meanwhile.
Yet, having compared 5.9.0 with 5.5 beta I concluded that
this message is very new, most probably written last year
after the related discussion in the Maxima Mailing list and
complaints (since the above files were again absent from the
distribution) by a colleague. Now I try to restore ODE as
much as I can in order to become able to use it.
Your help as well as any help by a colleague will be most
gratefully appreciated and will permit this serious bug in
Maxima to disappear.
Many sincere thanks in advance for this help, i.e. to find
out where are the missing files, use them and, if everything
is O.K. bring the message of ODE to its form existing
before about two years.
I am really grateful for your interest and precious help.
Many thanks again and best regards from Patras,
Nikos
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Fateman" <fateman at cs>
To: "Nikolaos I. Ioakimidis" <ioakimidis@otenet.gr>
Cc: "C Y" <smustudent1@yahoo.com>; "Wolfgang Jenkner" <wjenkner@inode.at>;
<macrakis@alum.mit.edu>; <maxima@mail.ma.utexas.edu>
Sent: Sunday, February 09, 2003 12:29 AM
Subject: Re: Contributed code (Was Re: [Maxima] Teaching)
> My assumption is that everything that was written by people
> at MIT or elsewhere and that was put into the MIT-MC ("macsyma
consortium")
> computer as of the time the technology was sold to Symbolics,
> (a) essentially belonged to DOE. That is, DOE had unlimited
> rights to redistribute it or designate others to redistribute.
> (b) DOE eventually did so. So everything (like odeaux) that
> you can see the source code for and was written prior to 1982
> is free to use (except perhaps in Cuba and North Korea?).
>
> I suggest you not spend time worrying about whether the authors
> who wrote this code 30 years ago wanted their code distributed
> under GPL. Use it.