----- Original Message ----- From: "R. William Gosper" <rwg@osots.com> ....
. There is also an effort (http://maxima.sourceforge.net/) to update the public domain version Maxima, i.e., to recapitulate the mountain of debugging and enfeaturement scaled by Symbolics and Macsyma, Inc. I sincerely wish them luck--Macsyma is an endangered cultural treasure.
The sourceforge project has some features that were never added to the commercial Macsyma, and even some bug fixes. Though the loss of the Macsyma Inc / Symbolics legacy is unfortunate. Downloading it and setting it up is trivial. (Click on the install icon).
Paul>Mathematica is nice. I use it on the Mac. It's not cheap, though. I sometimes wish they had some version in between the student version and the
professional version---a sort of hobbyist version.
I thought all versions were identical. Just the prices differ. There are other systems like Jacal, MuPAD (formerly free, but maybe no longer), Pari, ...