On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 8:20 PM, gsw<[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 26 Jun., 18:23, rjf <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Jun 25, 1:10 pm, gsw <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> > Hi,
>>
>> > I suspect you're just running out of RAM.
>> > Not necessarily physically, but the construction Sage --> expect
>> > interface --> Maxima --> Lisp implementation is a fragile one. If the
>> > Lisp implementation "thinks" it runs out of space, this is not handled
>> > too gracefully by Maxima, and as a consequence the synchronization
>> > between Sage/the expect interface, and Maxima, gets lost more or less
>> > often.
>>
>> the Maxima -->Lisp implementation is not especially fragile if you are
>> using the right lisp, which Sage is probably not.
>>
>> Some readers may recall that Bill Schelter was largely responsible for
>> both a particular Lisp (KCL, AKCL, and its successor GCL) as well as a
>> particular version of Maxima, and Bill  tuned them together.  People
>> who change the lisp underneath Maxima do not always have the same
>> perspective on parts that are unspecified in the standard, and so
>> bringing Maxima up on a non-GCL version of Lisp, while generally
>> pretty easy, may differ when (for example) the computation uses up all
>> the memory.
>>
>> I believe Sage is using CLISP or ECL, which may be fragile in such
>> ways.
>>
>> Downloading a properly configured Maxima on an appropriate Lisp may
>> solve your problem, if that is your goal.
>>
>
> Good point.
>
> I should have stated more explicitly the Lisp implementation, which in
> fact has been clisp in the past, and which (for Sage 4.0 IIRC) was
> changed to ecl. This change away from clisp was made because clisp has
> an "unresolvable" build issue on Solaris (on Sparc IIRC) with any
> recent version of gcc, and to support Sage on Solaris is a goal the
> Sage Development Team wants to achieve.
> I dimly seem to remember that ecl was the only alternative that builds
> and works "nicely" (without remembering what "nicely" meant exactly)
> on the broad and ever growing variety of platforms Sage currently is
> supported on.

ECL works on Solaris Sparc.   It is also much faster than clisp at
running Maxima  -- I did a few basic arithmetic benchmarks where it
was about 4 times faster.  So far even with some effort, certain
people have failed to get ECL + Maxima to work (for Sage) on Solaris
x86 and Microsoft Windows, which is pretty frustrating.

>> Using another version of Sage, which likely ALSO will have an non-
>> optimally configured Maxima is less likely to solve your problem.
>>
>> If you don't especially want to solve your problem, but prefer to see
>> if random diddling with Sage makes a difference, try gsw's
>> suggestions.
>
> :-)
>
> I don't know if anyone currently has a kind of "gcl.spkg" available
> for users to play around with it, especially to use it to replace the
> current "standard" Lisp spkg (ecl.spkg) used in Sage.

1. Debian's distribution of Sage uses GCL instead.
2. Anybody can use any Maxima they want with Sage -- just point
SAGE_ROOT/local/bin/maxima to the maxima you want to run.

 -- William

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