Hello, I was reading an article on the ENIAC, that monster could add 100,000 10 digits numbers in 1 second. At the time it was impressive in 1946 of course. I made this simple test, a naive test. I took maple 11, with a 3.0 Ghz PC pentium. ##################################### Digits:=10: som:=0: for i from 1 to 1e99 do: som:=som+1.0/i: if i mod 100000 = 0 then lprint(i,som) fi: od: ##################################### It displays the partial sum of the harmonic series every 100000 terms. this is not optimized, a lazy program. Well, this is the bad news. That loop made on a modern computer with one of the top programs goes at the SAME speed. It takes 1 second to display each step. Are we missing something ? of course, 1) 2 operations are made at each step. 2) the program is NOT optimized. 3) programmed in C, this would be a zillion times better. but still we are 60 years later and we hardly do better !!?? Does maple became a bloat-ware ? ps : the speed of the ENIAC was something like 0.001 Mhz... simon plouffe