numerics; was: ECL? was ..Re: Runtime determination of share directories?

On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Raymond Toy <toy.raymond at gmail.com> wrote:

> Numeric speed is not the reason to use maxima; there are many other
> things that would be better suited.

Well, at the risk of prolonging this discussion, my $0.02 on this
is that symbolic problems very often lead to numeric ones,
and it would be really nice to be able to solve such problems
all in one environment.

My pet example, not related to LAPACK or GMP or anything else,
is the computation of marginal probability distributions; typically
one can make some headway with symbolic calculations, but in
many cases it is necessary to resort to numerical approximations
(some variety of numerical integration).

FWIW

Robert Dodier