R: symbolic in C, was: Why do you prefer to work with Maxima?

Richard,

Thanks for this reference.  I want to learn Lisp too, but I have a hard time 
figuring it out by trying to read code.  Maybe I am just not as smart as I 
would like to be.  I would like to know the best language there is.

BTW Re: Greenspun's 10th.  Pw.mac has its own (partial) reimplementation of 
Maxima's 2 argument integrate command.  Only it is not as good, it punts to 
Maxima's integrate when it fails and is (I have to say this) buggier.

Rich


-----Original Message----- 
From: Richard Fateman
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2012 7:04 PM
To: Antonio Lapira
Cc: maxima at math.utexas.edu
Subject: Re: [Maxima] R: symbolic in C, was: Why do you prefer to work with 
Maxima?

On 11/27/2012 3:53 PM, Antonio Lapira wrote:
>> Feel free to clarify what you actually want.
> Just curiosity to read source code, I can read/write C code, but I don't 
> know anything about lisp

Since any reasonable C program to do symbolic computation would start by
implementing Lisp
(Greenspun's 10th law), you would do much better to learn Lisp in the
first place.  A good book
to start -- in fact it has chapters on computer algebra, simplification,
and symbolic integration,
is Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming  by Peter Norvig.

RJF
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