nayeri@cs.umass.edu (Farshad Nayeri) (09/13/90)
In article <15017@yunexus.YorkU.CA> philip@yunexus.yorku.ca (Phil McDunnough) writes: In article <ewright.653002910@convex.convex.com> ewright@convex.com (Edward V. Wright) writes: [lot's of stuff relating to CLI's and negative comments re Unix users] The data analysis program "S" I referred to was an example of how the current OS of the Mac makes it too difficult to move such a program to the Mac. SAS is another example. I don't think the current Mac interface makes it "hard" to port such programs, it is just that since it has a command-line interface, it would not apeal to the general Macintosh market. Now, if one ports S to the mac the right way, which is to keep the programming language and make the features menu driven as much as possible (not to say that this is an easy task.) I used S for a project once, and it was very convenient if you had more than 20 graphs that looked exactly the same. It is easy to tailor it, but it is very hard to learn it. But the main thing I liked about it was the fact that you could extend it to do what you want to do through its language. I am not sure about its mathematical functions, I used it for minor statistical stuff. I don't even think there is an X version for S either, which is something that I would think would be worth of doing. 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. Do you think Mathematica uses less memory on a different OS, or is it the lack of virtual memory that is hurting its Mac implementation? (By the way, I know nothing about Mathematica...) Philip McDunnough Professor of Statistics University of Toronto philip@utstat.toronto.edu [my opinions] --farshad -- Farshad Nayeri Object Oriented Systems Group nayeri@cs.umass.edu Dept. of Computer and Information Science (413)545-0256 University of Massachusetts at Amherst