On 4 January 2011 05:51, rjf <fate...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Jan 2, 2:14 pm, "Dr. David Kirkby" <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > >> http://www.math.bme.hu/~jtoth/FelsMma/mma.review.pdf >> >> but it is one of the most negative, biased "papers" I've ever seen. > > Could you be more specific? > Is there a particular statement that you believe to be false? > After all, that paper was reviewed by referees. > In my view, many of the comments > are pertinent to the current version as well as the version that was > reviewed (like version 2 and 3).
I'll send you some comments privately in a week or so - sage-devel is not really the place to discuss my thoughts about your Mathematica review paper. But I did think it was rather a biased review paper. > I have heard that others hold the belief that all the problems I > found have been corrected. I can believe that some of the minor > bugs have been fixed, but I suspect that every one of the major > mistakes > (under the guise of "features") remain. No doubt. But open-source software is no stranger to this either. Printing a floating point number like 0.123 without the leading 0 on some platforms some of the time is considered a feature of Maxima by some of its developers. > But this is perhaps not best place to discuss Mathematica bugs. Agreed. > My point regarding Mathematica licenses and Wolfram Alpha is > that there is a simple solution that involves not using Wolfram Alpha. > Not everyone needs access to Mathematica, as you continue to claim. I've never claimed everyone needs access to Mathematica. What I claim is: * The expected output of Sage tests should be verified to be correct if at all possible - we should not have tests where the "expected value" is what someone happens to get on their computer. That is the case in some tests. I'd like to see as a comment in the source code, why the expected output is correct. * Using Mathematica will in some cases give extra confidence the results from Sage are correct, if both Mathematica and Sage agree on the result. This is primarily because they are developed independently of each other. * Not everyone has access to Mathematica. * Wolfram|Alpha provides a sub-set of Mathematica. In some cases that subset may be sufficient to verify results. So I certainly do not claim everyone needs access to Mathematica. > A few. And if UW refuses to allow you to log in to some machine with > a license, you could mail your file to someone at UW. I think even you would see that it is more convenient to be able to use Wolfram|Alpha than to email someone else and ask them to try it in Mathematica. Dave -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
