Re: Maple vs Mathematica questions: symbolic & MacOS aspects only.

From: Hubert Holin (Hubert.Holin_at_meteo.fr)
Date: 06/08/04 

Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2004 18:16:09 +0200

Somewhere in the E.U., le 08/06/2004

   Bonjour

In article
<Christopher-Creutzig-wqsvfi72v5i.fsf@bursar.math.uni-paderborn.de>,
 Christopher Creutzig <ccr@mupad.de> wrote:

> Hubert Holin <Hubert.Holin@meteo.fr> writes:
>
> > A long time user of Maple, working under MacOS, I feel the time
> > has perhaps come to change CAS. I am thus looking for information (NOT
> > FLAMES, please) on whether I should now do so.
>
> If you want to change, you might want to have a look at MuPAD. As
> you can infer from my mail address I am certainly not unbiased here
> and since you did not specify what type of symbolic computation you
> are trying to tackle, I can't guess whether MuPAD will be what you
> are searching -- you'll have to find that out for yourself.
>
> A possible advantage of MuPAD over Mathematica for a Maple user is
> that the language is much more similar to Maple, so there is less to
> relearn.

      That definitely is an important point. I will look (again) into
MuPAD. I recall having looked at it in the past, but not settling on it
for reasons I now no longer remember.

> Note that as of this writing, MuPAD on the Macintosh is available in
> version 2.5 only, so the new graphics our Windows-users enjoy are not
> there yet. I would not be surprised to see 3.0 coming for Mac OS X
> only -- if support for OS 9 is an issue for you, MuPAD might get some
> minus points there.

      Support for MacOS 9 is a non-issue, as far as I am concerned. It
would be, however, disturbing if the Mac version were to lag behind the
windoze one. Perception (erroneous?) of a bias against my platform of
choice is one of the reasons why I am looking for an alternative to
Maple.

> > There is supposed to be a bridge between Matlab and Maple, but it
> > is not working on the Mac, at least with the versions I have (Maple 5 to
>
> The next MuPAD version for Mac will probably include a link to
> Scilab, which is claimed to be similar to Matlab.

      Yes, Scilab is nice. Not all the way to where MATLAB is (in term
of toolboxes, as it seems), and, judging from the examples on their
website, lacking seriously in the quality of figures which can be
produced (visualization is about as important as number crunching), but
usable for some non-trivial tasks. So a bridge between Scilab and MuPAD
is a good thing.

   Merci

         Hubert Holin

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