In terms of support, one major disadvantage of Sage, I think, is that significant pieces of the implementation apparently consists of pieces of code that are used as black boxes, and that the Sagemeisters proudly disavow knowledge of. Thus a bug traced to Maxima is unfixable "until we rewrite Maxima in python".
This effectively vitiates any advantage that might be obtained by the fact that these black boxes might be open source, or GPL, or portable. In terms of features, the idea expressed by Stan, that .... I suppose that this is not a fundamental disadvantage of Sage, as it is just a matter of implementing better algorithms. .... pretty much misses the point. Implementing better algorithms can take enormous effort. One example which I was looking at, in Mathematica, was the numerical (or symbolic-numeric) integration program, which seems to include about all the current algorithms merged in some way, including some novelties, like variable precision arithmetic and symbolic analysis. You could try to duplicate that, but it would not be "just a matter of ...." RJF --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
