rmtodd@servalan.uucp (Richard Todd) (09/13/90)
philip@yunexus.yorku.ca (Phil McDunnough) writes: >Your Mathematica reference is amusing. Mathematica needs 8 megs of RAM on the >Mac to run properly, and it is not even a high powered symbolic mathematical >program. It is great for graphics, but its mathematical libraries are limited >in comparison to similar programs on other platforms. Most people I know >simply use the Mac as a front end to Mathematica running on a better OS. Uh, my understanding is that Mathematica is a serious memory hog on any machine, and in fact is even more spectacular at eating memory on those non-Mac OSes which actually allow a process to use more than 8M. I recall seeing a posting from a guy with the NeXT Mathematica saying that swap space usage of 40M was not uncommon. Anyway, just because Mathematica is rather piggy in the memory department doesn't say much about the Mac. Are you familiar with Maple? It's one of the more common and respected symbolic algebra programs, seems to be somewhat more powerful than Mathematica, and is a lot less piggy; I'm currently running it with a memory allocation of 3.5M, and doing fairly nasty mathematics with it (I'm talking manipulating math expressions so big they won't fit on the screen even in closely packed 9-point type...) The existence of Maple for the Mac is a substantial argument that a good CLI-type scientific program can exist on the Mac. Now, the graphics capabilities of Maple aren't as nice as Mathematica (Maple can't really do 3-d surface plots at all), but I'm willing to accept that for the much lighter load Maple presents on the memory. Oh yeah, besides all that, Maple only costs half as much as Mathematica. :-) >As for your comment about Unix users making demands on the Mac, I might point >out that I have been a Mac user( and still am) for a long time( as well as a >very happy GS user, BTW). Apple makes excellent products. There's no need to >restrict the computer to niche markets. It has, IMHO , an important role to >play in scientific investigation. One of the reasons I'm using it, with Maple, to help with some of the nastier math involved in my research topic... >One thing should be made clear. Multitasking is not a luxury. Those who think >it is haven't really made proper use of it. The same goes with piping,etc... I'll definitely go along with this. I can hardly stand to deal with a Mac that doesn't have A/UX on it. The ability to put jobs in the background, do pipes and shell scripts, etc., is invaluable. Not to mention being able to use GNU Emacs (which, IMHO, is more powerful than any text editor on *any* platform I've seen, and a whole lot more powerful than most Mac editors I've seen). And of course it's nice to be able to run nn, in order to reply to articles like this :-). -- Richard Todd rmtodd@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu rmtodd@chinet.chi.il.us rmtodd@servalan.uucp