8 Mar
2015
8 Mar
'15
9:43 a.m.
On 3/7/15 9:05 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
On 06/03/15 9:40 AM, Mouse wrote:
That might be more similar to APL, then.
This has been rattling around in my mind for a little while now and I
think one reason I didn't think of things like Mathematica or Matlab is
that they're single-implementation. ...
It certainly existed on SPARC, though... Mathematica was very widely
ported because of the era it was born in - it supported just about
every serious platform of the 1980s - I remember seeing price lists
with maybe 50 different ports, everything from SPARC to Mac to Cray
(at the time I used it on Mac 68K and I have a license for NeXT).
Wolfram's pathologically proprietorial mentality doesn't support the
spirit of openness that progress and science require; a tragedy when
so many have sleepwalked into relying on his black-box tools ...
While it doesn't have all of the bells and whistles of Mathmatica,
something in the same vein is Maxima (a port of the DOE version of
Macsyma). Both are symbolic processing. I use Maxima in situations
where I don't have a Mathmatica license readily available. There are
several books on Macsyma also available.
Maxima is open source and is easily portable. The distribution does
have a lisp included (can't remember if it's binary or source) but that
lisp is also readily available as I recall but I would think that any
common lisp implementation would work. It also integrates (sorry for
the pun) with gnuplot for some pretty spectacular graphing. There's
also a graphical front end (so you can use the various TeX fonts to
integrals and other math input/output looks good on the screen).
TTFN - Guy
> one other, which you may or may not classify as a
?language?, is
> Mathematica.
I don't know enough about it to offer an opinion [...]
I've been using
Mathematica for years. [...] I've also used MatLab
which also falls somewhat into that category. MatLab is is really
optimized around vectors and arrays.