hhasan@max.physics.sunysb.edu (Hidayat Hasan) (12/08/90)
-> We have a Mathematica package on our system for the last one year. Recently, I decided to explore its capabilities. I have encouraged several of my fellow graduate students to use it for there programming. I myself have written several small programs and a couple of packages. -> I would like to exchange ideas about the plus and minus points of the Mathematica with other users. I would particularly like to hear and learn from people who are using the system for longer time and also from people who have used similar other packages. -> So far, our impressions about 'MATHEMATICA -- A System for Doing Mathematics by Computer" are: -> It is very easy to use for common computations. -> It handles symbolic mathematics efficiently. -> Due to the large library of build-in functions programming is generally very concise. -> For common numerical work no special knowledge of 'language' is required. -> It can handle all kind of graphics but making changes from the default values is not as neat as the rest of the system. -> Although its speed for many numerical works is impressive (it takes less than 45 seconds to calculate pi to 5000 places of decimal on our system), the time for programs written by us seems to increase exponentially with the size of the code. Is it our novice programming or other users also have the same impression? -> My prior apologies if this is not the right newsgroup to discuss this. If so, can someone direct me to the right one. Thanks. -- _______________________________________________________________________________ Hidayat Hasan, Physics Deptt., SUNY at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794. """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""