Re: What should Mma be?
- To: mathgroup at yoda.physics.unc.edu
- Subject: Re: What should Mma be?
- From: bleier at menu.visus.com (Alan Bleier)
- Date: Mon, 23 Nov 92 10:23:57 EST
Warren Wiscombe wrote: "I would prefer to see Mma remain a prototyping environment. I don't care if my plot labels look crummy, or if they can't be done in a special font (although Greek would be nice to have, throughout Mma and not just for plot decoration), or if I can't submit my Mma notebook immediately for publication. Mma-to-TeX translators are nice, but I would much prefer to see Mma resources poured into more and better packages that do real mathematics, like asymptotics (a notable lacuna) or better recognition of ODE forms that are reducible to known forms. To me, Mma is a place to do mathematics..." I wholeheartedly agree. The graphics are OK. Real math packages are the most important thing to keep adding. Greek characters would save a lot of ugly typing out of alpha's and betas (and even MathCAD can do this :-). We use Mathematica for prototyping and C or even spreadsheets for production, once we've used Mathematica to understand how to solve a problem. Using different tools for different parts of computing makes a lot of sense to me if they each do their part of the job well. Alan -- Alan Bleier Member of the Technical Staff Cognos*centi Corporation Phone 412-488-3909 2100 Wharton Street, Suite 701 FAX 412-488-7599 Pittsburgh, PA 15203 USA bleier at cognos-centi.com