I'm extremely unhappy with the last few versions of Maple. They are adding piles of useless features, and not bothering to test the basics. Apparently at random, it will turn on the hour-glass icon when it is not doing a computation, and the stop button is greyed out. Maple just locks up for several minutes. It has become useless to me. I currently have version 9.5, which I bought as a student edition for $150 total. At that price, I can't complain, but I would not pay the full price, which I think is around $2000. You can buy the student edition online, but you have to assert that you are a student. Another possibility is Macsyma. See symbolics.com, where they offer Macsyma for $500. RWG once worked for Macsyma, and he likely has useful hints. Gene --- <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
I hope to buy one of {maple, mathematica, mathlab} to run on a Macintosh I'm planning to buy in the near future.
I'd like to hear preferences and reasons from any of you who have used more than one of these.
(I've never used matlab, but find that mathematica's incessant need for typing capital letters to begin each built-in command, together with its uniformly mediocre help files -- at least compared with maple's -- cause me to lean toward maple over mathematica.
But I'd love to hear others' opinions. I'm curious about breadth of features, ease of use, and quality of graphics. (Price is relevant, too.)
--Dan _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
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