On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 02:00:48PM -0500, Raymond Toy wrote:
> >>>>> "Fabrizio" == Fabrizio Caruso <caruso at dm.unipi.it> writes:
> Perhaps things will run a little slower, but machines are hundreds
> (thousands?) of times faster now than when maxima was originally
> written.
Assuming moore's law holds, and that doubling in speed occurred every
1.5 years.... and macsyma was written initially in 1968 according to
wikipedia...
2^((2007-1968)/1.5) ~ 67 x 10^6 :-)
There are probably many things that maxima could do now that would
take inconcievably long when the code was written. Even if we use 1982
as the base year (the year maxima forked from macsyma) and "only" get
a factor of 104032
I think the GCL result is the worst of the problems. There's nothing
like a computation silently producing a seriously wrong answer
somewhere in the middle where you don't notice it.
--
Daniel Lakeland
dlakelan at street-artists.org
http://www.street-artists.org/~dlakelan