Message-ID: <8b356f880902101446n7083e20dg8813015c8695d551@mail.gmail.com>
Date: 2009-02-10T22:46:00Z
From: Stavros Macrakis
Subject: general inverse solver?
In-Reply-To: <971536df0902100451y25aeecaaq88bb5720310ef258@mail.gmail.com>
On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 7:51 AM, Gabor Grothendieck
<ggrothendieck at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...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