Re: yacas and Mathematics task
"Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso" <jordigh@gmail.com> writes:
> 2008/11/13 Chris Walker <chrisw@chiark.greenend.org.uk>:
> > Alternatives packaged for Debian seem to be Maxima,
> > axiom/openaxiom/FriCAS, sympy - any comments on these?
I asked this in private e-mail rather than to the list. I find the
answer really helpful and Jordi is happy for me to post it to the list.
>
> Maxima is probably the most mature of these... which isn't saying
> much, unfortunately. Maxima can often be coaxed to get you the answer
> you want for a large class of problems, but it can be maddeningly
> difficult to do so. A recent example is that Maxima won't give you the
> solution to something like sqrt(x-1) = x -3 in any obvious way unles
> you go ahead and square both sides yourself before feeding it to it.
> Yacas faces the same problem with this one!
>
> Axiom is also mature, but it seems to be almost completely abandoned!
> They released it, but nobody seems to be maintaining it -- while
> Maxima development which is fast-paced and active. I think Openaxiom
> is a fork to address this abandonment, but it doesn't seem to be very
> developed itself either!
These comments are really useful. If I get time, I'll collate
these and other comments and put them on the debian science wiki.
>
> I don't know about FriCAS or sympy. Ask someone else about those.
Chris
Reply to: