Why do you prefer to work with Maxima?

>>>>> "Steve" == Steve Haflich <smh at franz.com> writes:

    Steve> Dan <vi5u0-maxima at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
    Steve>    Out of interest, why "kidding"?  What, in principle or in practice,
    Steve>    would be wrong with trying to compile Maxima using Emacs Lisp with its
    Steve>    Common Lisp emulation package?
   
    Steve> Does elisp have bignums yet?

    Steve> (1+ most-positive-fixnum)
    Steve> -536870912

xemacs:

(1+ most-positive-fixnum)
4611686018427387904

I guess that means xemacs has a 62-bit fixnum. (This is on a 64-bit
machine.)

However, unless the common lisp emulation package also includes CLOS,
some functionality will be missing for numerical work.  I wonder if
the commmon lisp emulation is good enough to build a working version
of PCL[1]? ?

Ray

[1] PCL is the implementation of CLOS used in at least cmucl, sbcl,
    and, I think, gcl.  Perhaps others use it too.