From: pratt@Sunburn.Stanford.EDU (Vaughan R. Pratt) Subject: Re: Mathmatica like package for linux? Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1993 19:19:58 GMT
In article <1993Sep16.051838.111300@ns1.cc.lehigh.edu> dlj0@ns1.cc.lehigh.edu (DAVID L. JOHNSON) writes:
>In article <2780o5$hg8@Tut.MsState.Edu>, simmons@EE.MsState.Edu (David Simmons) writes:
>>Does anybody know of a "simple", small program that can handle
>>simplifying algebraic expressions and calculating derivatives
>>and integrals, like MET or DERIVE?
>>
>
>I have to recommend maxima over the others mentioned in this thread. It'll do
>more than you asked, but does what you ask better than anything else in
>linux, w/o the hassle (IMO) of calc/emacs.
Yes, yes, YES. (I've been getting a bit impatient hearing about all
these also-rans.) I downloaded maxima a few days ago to my Linux box
and it was everything I remembered Macsyma/vaxima/svaxima being,
*including* the very long compile time. If you want a symbolic
manipulation system of the caliber of Linux, namely top quality and
free, maxima is *the* way to go.
Get it as two packages, clisp + maxima, namely
tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/packages/lisp/clisp-english.tar.z
tsx-11.mit.edu:/pub/linux/packages/lisp/maxima.lzh
and install them in that order. The entire installation, which took a
couple of hours or more (only ten minutes of my time fortunately), all
went with only a single hitch: when following the clisp README I obeyed
And create a shell script that starts lisp:
cat > /usr/local/bin/clisp
#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/local/lib/lisp/lisp.run -M
/usr/local/lib/lisp/lispinit.mem "$@"
[Ctrl-D]EOF
chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/clisp
by simplying pasting the whole paragraph to my shell, failing to notice
that the second last line needed translating to a single control-D (it
was late at night). This being the level at which things could go
wrong, I'd say this release of clisp+maxima makes them a very robust
team.
With regard to maxima, the main heros here as I see it are MIT's Joel
Moses for the initiating and managing the first decade of Macsyma
development (mid-60's to mid-70's), UC Berkeley's Richard Fateman for
porting Macsyma to vmunix, on the Vax as vaxima and later on the Sun as
svaxima (late 70's to early 80's), and UTexas's Bill Schelter for his
well-planned port to Common Lisp (late 80's).
-- Vaughan Pratt (FTPables: boole.stanford.edu:/pub/ABSTRACTS.)