Re: Looking for Derive workalikes

[Jan Hlavacek <lahvak@math.ohio-state.edu>]

On Sat, Jan 30, 1999 at 06:53:00PM +0800, Rhandeev Singh wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Jan 1999, Bill Tihen wrote:
> > MathCAD, etc are all too expensive.  
> 
> What kind of functionality do the educators need in such a program?
> 
> GNU Octave (the MATLAB clone wannabe) is young but promising.  It just
> *might* be easier to try to bend octave to do what we need it to do
> instead of trying to start from scratch. 

Octave is for numerical computations.  There are tons of programs for
numerical computations,  but what is needed here is a symbolic algebra
system.  One thing which may ne worth looking into is JACAL,  a symbolic
algebra system written in scheme.  I've just discovered it two days ago,
and didn't have a chance to try it yet.  It seems that it can do
derivatives,  but I didn't see any integrals.  

I believe that the derive is so popular because of its graphing
capabilities and ease of use.  I've never used it,  but this is the
impression I got from a booklet which I grabbed at the derive display at
San Antonio joint meetings.  So even if we start with already finished
symbolic algebra package,  writing the front end will not be trivial
(just look how even Wolfram Research can screw up when it comes to
writing a front end :().


On the other hand, is a symbolic algebra package something what our high
school math curriculum really needs?  I mean,  wouldn't it be possible
to get better results with numerical package?  Or a simulation program?

-- 
Jan Hlav\'{a}\v{c}ek
lahvak@math.ohio-state.edu  (Blind Carbon Copies will bounce)
www: http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~lahvak/