Re: Some other symbolic math programs...

[George <jirka@5z.com>]

On Fri, Feb 25, 2000 at 03:34:00PM -0500, Nils Barth wrote:
> Hiyas-
> I know it's a bit early to talk about much symbolic stuff in
> Dr Genius, but I figured people might want to add links to the
> following open source/free software programs to some part of the
> web page, and if interested, take a look at them.
> 
> JACAL -- a GNU program (GPL) that isn't very actively developed.
> Might be good as a start.
> http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~jaffer/JACAL.html
> 
> PARI/GP -- mostly aimed at number theorists, and I can't find the
> license, but I think it's some kind of open one (it works in emacs
> or uses readline -- I'm guessing GPL).
> http://www.math.u-bordeaux.fr/A2X/Logiciels.html
> 
> Hope these are interesting/useful; could someone start a page
> of ``other free (as-in-freedom) math software'' on the Dr Genius
> site?

Yeah, there seems to be a number of symbolic math packages out there.  So
once I get everything converted to cln, which is taking me longer becaue I'm
lazy and didn't work on dr genius that much the last two weeks.  The good
thing is that I think I'm now much closer to making it at least compile and
perhaps run.  I think it's only like a day or two worth of work, but I would
have to dedicate a day or two to it :)

I guess gluing together more packages sounds like the best strategy for
dr genius anyway.  We get a LOT of functionality with a common interface that
way.  Most of these packages have different and usually advanced interfaces
(or are just programming libraries).  Which of course sucks for a program
like dr genius which should be for people that just want to sit down and do
some math without having to learn stuff.  However the functionality is there
and rewriting it would be dumb.  (hence me using CLN even though I'm not too
crazy about having to use a C++ compiler)

George