Re: comparison of Maple and Mathematica
- To: mathgroup at yoda.physics.unc.edu
- Subject: Re: comparison of Maple and Mathematica
- From: twj
- Date: Tue, 24 Aug 93 09:29:24 CDT
Christopher Lee writes. >Hello, our lab is considering purchasing a math >package for our SGI's or SPARCS. We are trying >to decide between Mathematica and Maple. Most of >us have only used Mathematica. However, Maple >would interface with this other very expensive >visualization software package,PV-WAVE, that we >are considering purchasing. I'm looking for >advice on the comparitive advantages and >disadvantages of the two packages to guide our >decision from people who have looked at both. There are fundamental differences between Mathematica and Maple as systems. These are often discussed and addressed in the relevant mailgroups. I won't address this other than to say that I believe that Mathematica is more consistently designed and extensible than Maple, it also provides a far wider range of functionality. To this particular question of connecting to a visualisation package I say this: If one is considering a connection from either Mathematica and Maple to a dedicated visualisation product it is important to remember that the Maple connection is usually engineered by making a special Maple version for a particular connection for a particular machine. This means that the version of Maple is not guaranteed to be the latest version or available for all platforms. Also since development is being carried out for a minority of users it is not certain that it will be supported for future versions. Mathematica takes a different approach: to provide MathLink. MathLink is the Mathematica communication protocol. This protocol is public and used by an increasing number of applications. What is important is that it can be extended and developed by anyone who has a knowledge of programming. Thus WRI put their development effort into developing MathLink rather than lots of individual and different links. Since MathLink provides the same interface, developing a variety of connections which make use of it is quite straightforward since there is no special engineering required. Even though anyone could develop these, at WRI we have worked to break the ground by building a number of connections to other applications. Some of these applications have been visualisation products and a number of connections, for example to SpyGlass Transform and AVS, are available. In progress are connections to Explorer and LabView. These connections do not rely on WRI supporting the particular link but on WRI supporting MathLink which is a fundamental part of Mathematica. To use these connections you just require a normal version of Mathematica. In addition many of the links are distributed in source code form and people are free to enhance and extend them as they wish. Therefore there is maximum flexibility. Another advantage of MathLink is that it is network based. Since it runs across a network it is possible to connect Mathematica to some other application across a wide variety of different computer systems. Thus both a SPARC version of Mathematica and a Macintosh version of Mathematica could connect to a visualisation application running on an SGI. Tom Wickham-Jones WRI