general inverse solver?

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 7:51 AM, Gabor Grothendieck

...Also while Maxima is more sophisticated in terms of algorithms,

Glad to hear it... (I first worked on Maxima in 1971...)

yacas is actually more sophisticated from the viewpoint of its language which borrows ideas from both imperative and prolog programming

It is true that Yacas has a nicer syntax for its pattern-matching
functionality than Maxima, but I think they are fundamentally very
similar.  In particular, as far as I can tell, neither does
backtracking or unification, so neither is very Prolog-like.

and its interfaces are more sophisticated (it is one of the few CAS systems
that developed an OpenMath interface) and its socket server is
used by the Ryacas interface.

Maxima interfaces to a variety of other systems via sockets.  It does
not have an OpenMath interface (yet!), but I don't know how useful
that is compared to other linearized tree structures.

yacas can also translate math expressions to TeX and do exact arithmetic.

Maxima can also output TeX and do exact rational arithmetic and
arbitrary-precision floating-point arithmetic.  Maxima also handles a
variety of cases which apparently Yacas doesn't, like factorization of
multivariate polynomials (seems pretty basic!), many special
functions, etc.  Maxima also has an active user and development
community.

           -s