On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 11:04 AM, Oliver Kullmann
<O.Kullmann at swansea.ac.uk> wrote:
> Likely the weakness is the quadratic effort for evaluating the L[i] !
Well, bear in mind that Maxima carries out arithmetic via simplification.
That makes symbolic results possible, but at the price of making arithmetic
on literal numbers more complicated than it has to be. So if some formulation
of the problem runs faster than another, I would be interested to know how
simplification plays into it. In the absence of evidence to the contrary,
I would guess indexing is a secondary problem.
To some extent, Maxima can detect special cases when translating a
function to Lisp code. When all operands are known to be numbers, that
could yield a substantial speed-up.
FWIW
Robert Dodier