2012/12/16 Bill Wood <william.wood3 at comcast.net>:
> I believe that the CAS in the TI-89 is a port of, or is at least based
> on, the DERIVE CAS which TI bought from its original owners (IIRC SOFT
> WAREHOUSE). I had DERIVE for PC many years ago; it was pretty good for
> the price but still limited. It was marketed toward the education
> community, which may have helped the TI 89 succeed there. I *think*
> that DERIVE was at least partly written in a custom-developed version
> of lisp which the company sold under the name MU-LISP. It differed
> quite a bit from conventional lisps.
FWIW Texas has dropped Derive and now sells TI Nspire.
A 30 day evaluation (with all features) version is available here:
http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/productDetail/us_nspire_cas_software.html
For the a high school student NSpire is a good choice. It is not as advanced
as Maxima, but the GUI is simple. In recent versions one can mix
text and formulas using "Notes". Students can therefore write their
exercises entirely in NSpire. The text editing facilities are basic, but
improving for each version.
The builtin programming language is, well, not quite as bad as in
the TI89 days, but close. It seems TI knows this, in the two latest versions
they have introduced scripting in (sic) Lua.
A high school friendly GUI with text editing capabilities would be
a worthwhile project.
In Denmark "Maxima" has become somewhat widespread in the
form of WordMat. WordMat is a plugin for Microsoft Word on Windows.
If a student want to solve an equation, he writes it with Microsofts
equation editor, clicks the "solve" button and enters the variable
he wants to solve for. The plugin translates these formulas into something
Maxima can parse, Maxima solves the equation, and the results are
inserted in the Word document below the original equation.
http://www.eduap.com/WordMat/
--
Jens Axel S?gaard