On 1/15/08, Mario Rodriguez <biomates at telefonica.net> wrote:
> At this point I am not sure what to do with stats. Should we continue
> with the development of stats? or should we wait for a foreign functions
> call system in Maxima to call R routines? (I have no idea how hard will
> it be to implement this second alternative.)
The strength of Maxima compared to R is that Maxima is symbolic
throughout and R is not. It seems to me that any statistical function
would ideally return either a numerical or a symbolic result depending
on the arguments. Maxima can call R to handle the numeric case but
we're on our own for the symbolic case.
So I think there is a lot of value in statistical functions for Maxima.
An external numerical library can help, but it can't displace Maxima entirely.
FWIW
Robert