> Ondrej, Bernard, and Tim have been sort of arguing in response to > Rob Dodier's nice post... In their discussion they are I think seeing > everything too much in black and white, and missing the shades > of grey. Here's what we actually do in Sage: > > 1. Identify needed functionality (e.g., compute characteristic > polynomials of matrices, or "symbolic calculus"). > > 2. Find the existing best open source free option that > implements 1, if there is any (e.g., say the pari C library > in the above example, or "maxima" + a very sophisticated > Python interface). >
Then there is a natural question arising here: did you really review all the existing open source CAS at that time and how did you choose? I don't have an exact picture of the functionnalities of CAS in 2005 but it seems to me that giac/xcas was already in the same class than maxima (with of course some - and some +) and axiom certainly remains a leader in symbolic integration. Then the question is not really "which is the best CAS" because I believe that the answer will depend on the needs of the user. But I had the impression that Sage tries to use for each algorithm the best open-source software. If this is really the objective of Sage, then you can't have a single answer for CASes. Sometimes it is better to call axiom, sometimes maxima and sometimes xcas and sometimes maybe another CAS. Therefore my question: what is the roadmap of Sage for symbolic computations? Really reimplement from scratch everything, slowly replacing maxima? Or build interfaces to e.g. axiom or giac or *put here your favorite open-source CAS* and use the best one depending on the kind of problem. If it is the first possibility, then I loose my time here and I'll have a much better job to speak directly with axiom and maxima developers if they are interested to discuss with me. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
