Hi Richard, On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 6:07 PM, Richard Fateman <[email protected]> wrote: > I would not think it was "the first CAS"... but maybe the first at > something.. > > There were quite a few systems way back then. A big conference > with lots of system descriptions in papers was held in 1966.
Did you attend it? You would be 20 at that time. > > The structure of the > Lisp simplifier written by Knut Korsvold (circa 1963) is still in Maxima. > The rather more sophisticated systems by William A. Martin and > Joel Moses came just a bit later (1966 or so). Their theses include > source code. But there were others from that time > like FORMAC (August, 1962) I am aware of Joel Moses' code, called SIN, described in his thesis, available at [3]. > > http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=807969 But I wasn't aware of FORMAC. Thanks for the paper link, I'll read it on Monday. > and there was also Reduce and CAMAL Yes, I think Both Reduce and CAMAL started in 1968. > > Schoonschip had a particular niche and was successful in it. > As an inspiration for other 'CAS' implementers, I think it > fell way short of what Veltman believed to be the case. > Running initially on CDC computers, written in assembler, > and aimed at problems where sorting of large numbers of terms > was critical, it probably could do computations that no other > system could do. On the other hand, all numbers were > (still are?) machine floats. And Veltman was not keen on > notions like "user-friendly" interfaces. Indeed, I think it was used to compute quite a few results in particle physics, so I would think that it was very successful at this. I think the de-factor successor of Schoonschip is FORM [1], started in 1984, but it is still maintained, I just compiled it today and played with it a bit, it works great. Everything is expanded and FORM can only do term by term operations, so it can do various substitutions and expansions, but no factoring, and also it has no series expansion (unless you code it yourself), limits, integration, none of it. I think Schoonschip was probably similar, so it is a specialized CAS for a specific purpose, it's not a general purpose CAS. I thought the speed of FORM was very good, but I am aware of your article [2] and the section "An anecdote about FORM". [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FORM_%28symbolic_manipulation_system%29, https://github.com/vermaseren/form [2] Fateman, R. (2003). Comparing the speed of programs for sparse polynomial multiplication. ACM SIGSAM Bulletin, 37(1), 4. doi:10.1145/844076.844080 [3] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/MIT/MIT-LCS-TR-047-corrected-ocr.pdf -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CADDwiVAANB0LXkBgU3WnrWN3R%2BQq7P_8hvwTk7p8dNK2EezYBw%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
