wrong program? was:Re: [Maxima] Strange floating point behaviour

Have you considered using one of the numerical programs for
your work?  Essentially ALL of the items that you mention
are peripheral to what Maxima does.  It could be that
you should be using Matlab or one of its free clones
like Octave. These programs are centrally concerned
with numerics and (at least for Matlab), plotting, and
you do not seem to need the essential part of Maxima,
which is the symbolic facility.

Your earlier question about floats was (I think) answered
by keepfloat:true

but in fact this setting essentially destroys the supposedly
exact nature of mathematical computation in Maxima.

The math "notebook", the GUI, and plotting are all part
of the commercial macsyma system, but interestingly, NONE
of these parts are in the kernel. They are in a separately
written front end. The front end tends to be expensive to
produce, in part because it varies from operating system to
operating system, on different hardware, and even with different
underlying lisp implementations.

I think the same general design separation of a front end
 is used in Maple and Mathematica, although the details are
different.

While I also applaud your use of Maxima in high school, I
think that if you are not using the symbolic features, you
could get more "sizzle" elsewhere, in a package specific
to your computer environment, limited to numerics and plotting.

I hope that, nevertheless, others can solve your particular
plotting requirements, especially if the symbolic parts
are also important to you.


RJF


Janos Blazi wrote:

> Am Fri, 17 Oct 2003 00:45:14 -0400 hat Stavros Macrakis 
> <stavros.macrakis@verizon.net> geschrieben:
>
>>> I have this work sheet (I teach at a high school):
>>
>>
>> Great to see Maxima being used in a high school!
>
>
> Thank you very much for your response.
> I started using Maxima but now I am loosing my courage a bit as there 
> seem to be serious obstacles.
> I mean the following points:
>
> 1)  No modern GUI.
> 2)  Problem with carrying out calculations in floating point.
> 3)* Problem with plot2d: I do not know how I can scale graphics output,
>     I do not know, how I can draw curves with x-scale and y-scale being
>     equal (that is, in "isometric mode", what you get in Maple pressing
>     the "1:1" button or in MuPad specifying "Scaling=Constraint").
> 4)* I do not know how to prettyprint a session with the graphics being
>     embedded into the output (using the fonts size I prefer).
> 5)  I do not know how to draw points for example and how to plot several
>     plots at once (you can do this in Maple and in MuPad). I do not know
>     how to plot points, for example.
>
> I could do without 1), 2) and 5) but I cannot do without 3)* and 4)*. 
> So at this state of play, Maxima can be used at high school, but Maple 
> or MuPad are definitely preferable if you have the money (which we hav 
> e not).
>