🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <SCHULTZ.92Aug29220351@halley.est.3m.com>
schultz@halley.est.3m.com (John C. Schultz) writes:
>Is maple free? anon ftp sites?  All I could find asking ARCHIE was
>maple DOS demo programs.
>
>Also, not to start a flame war, but why use MAPLE V vs Mathematica if
>they both cost money.  Mathematica seems to be the most widely used
>from my viewpoint in a hole :-).

There are four major "full-featured" symbolic algebra systems:
Macsyma, Reduce, Maple, and Mathematica.  All are basically workable,
all cost (widely varying amounts of) money.

IMHO, in some sense the differences between them are comparable
to those between Pascal, C, Fortran, PL/I, and Basic:  They're
all fundamentally equivalent in power, but in practice there are
large differences between them in power, speed, memory use,
correctness, "look and feel", and amount-of-marketing-hype.  The
programming language anlogy is also useful in illuminating the
nature of many of the inter-system flame wars...

For a quite detailed, relatively unbiased, and IMHO very cogent
and well written, review of and comparison betwen these and other
symbolic algebra systems, see Barry Simon's latest review in the
August 1992 "PC Magazine".

Further discussion of the relative merits of various symbolic
algebra systems should probably occur in sci.math.symbolic if at
all; please note the "Follup-To" header line.

- Jonathan Thornburg
  <jonathan@einstein.ph.utexas.edu> or <jonathan@hermes.chpc.utexas.edu>
  University of Texas at Austin / Physics Dept / Center for Relativity
  and (for a few more months) U of British Columbia / {Astronomy,Physics}