On Jan 3, 11:48 am, Tim Lahey <tim.la...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 3, 2009, at 2:43 PM, mabshoff wrote:
Hi Tim,
> > Given a choice between Pan-Axiom, Maxima and Reduce for the role of
> > symbolic calculus in Sage these days I personally would pick FriCAS
> > over the other choices. But since all of the above do not solve the
> > fundamental problem of using pexpect I think that in the long term we
> > will come up with something on our own, i.e. partially sympy and
> > partially our own code. That doesn't mean the interface to any
> > existing system will be removed, just that Maxima would potentially at
> > some point be made optional - should it ever come to the point where
> > we have something better.
>
> FriCAS has the problem that in some cases it is very slow.
Ok, can you report them to the FriCAS people so they can potentially
fix this? Part of the problem might also be clisp here, so let's see
how for example ecl fares.
> It turns out
> that there are many of these slow cases based upon my tests. If Reduce
> can support multiple solutions directly and is faster than FriCAS then
> it is a viable interim solution.
Well, interim is a bad, bad word :). Seriously, switching from one to
the other and sorting out all the build issues and even writing the
code takes a considerable amount of man power. If that is going to be
replaced in a year's time (just to throw around a figure) it is much
better in the mean time to "hang in there" with Maxima and concentrate
on our own code and shifting functionality to SymPy in the cases where
it is appropriate.
And re the speed concern: Correctness should come first. As is non of
the solutions seem to be very fast and/or as powerful as MMA in the
average case (I am sure you can find problem classes when Axiom and or
Maxima beat the pants of MMA, but that is likely on average not the
case).
One thing that reduce did very well last time we checked was mv
factorization. Maybe the mv gcd is also very fast, so I think there is
potential there. But unless someone actually goes out, builds a spkg,
tests it on many platforms this is all an academic exercise :)
> However, I think a native solution is
> the preferred approach in the long term.
+1
> Cheers,
>
> Tim.
Cheers,
Michael
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