Re: OpenAxiom-1.1.0 released

D Herring <dherring@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
I'm pleased to announce that OpenAxiom-1.1.0 has been released on
February 14, 2008.

Congratulations.

I just installed Fricas a week ago... Is there a document
highlighting the differences between Axiom/Fricas/OpenAxiom for those
of us "not in the loop"?


First a disclaimer: I work on FriCAS so I am biased and may miss some
important information about other flavours.

IMHO main differences concern internal structure: FriCAS removed large
parts of unused code, simplified some other parts and reorganized
build process so that things which can be generated from sources in
fact are generated. In principle such changes are invisible for users,
but in practice thanks to structural changes now FriCAS is much easier
to modify than Axiom from the past. OpenAxiom also improved internal
structure, but ATM chages are smaller than in FriCAS. Axiom project
rejected most changes made to FriCAS and OpenAxiom (and changes
made to Axiom go in entirely different direction -- you can get the
idea from Tim Daly post).

Concerning user visible differences:

- FriCAS fixes tens of problems -- more than other flavours.
- FriCAS supports simplified build procedure which allows very fast build
of released versions
- FriCAS contains several speed improvements. Some of speed improvements
are now included in other flavours but I expect FriCAS to be the
fastest one.
- FriCAS added several new mathematical functions. The biggest addition,
guessing package written by Martin Rubey is now also included in Axiom
but some smaller ones are only in FriCAS.
- Lisp support: All Axiom versions need a Lisp system to run. In ideal
world user would not care which Lisp is used. But unfortunatly one
some machines Axiom could not run because GCL (the Lisp used by Axiom)
do not run on those machines. FriCAS allows you to use five different
Lisp systmes: GCL, ECL, Clisp, sbcl or openmcl. In particular this
allows to have fully functioning FriCAS (with help and graphics) on
Windows (using Cygwin). Also, currently on average sbcl based FriCAS
is the fastest one (faster than gcl based FriCAS).

--
Waldek Hebisch
hebisch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.