Is Maxima modular?...(and/or How learn source code?...)

On Sat, 29 Mar 2003, Richard Fateman wrote:

> There is a notion that underlies much of the CAS
> "rewriting" that has been done in building Maple,
> Mathematica, Mupad, Singular, Pari etc.  And that is that the
> old systems like Reduce, Scratchpad, Macsyma, are
> kludgey, non-modular, etc  because the people who
> built them were doing something wrong, and that
> new systems will not suffer from the same problems
> because people know better now.

Also remember that you're talking about code that was written around the
1970s, when processor speeds were under a MHz, and RAM came (if you were
lucky) in 64 Kb chunks.  I don't know the Maxima code, but having worked
on/with codes that started in the same era, I would suspect that a lot of
that "kludginess" is really very clever programming that was done because
it was the only way to get Maxima to run on the available hardware.

So maybe you don't need that sort of effort because you've got a 3 GHz
machine with a gig of RAM on your desktop, but that just means you aren't
considering big enough problems :-)

James