On Sat, 19 Aug 2000, Parisse Bernard <parisse@mozart.ujf-grenoble.fr> wrote:
On Sat, 19 Aug 2000, Ayal Pinkus <apinkus@xs4all.nl> wrote:
I am a bit curious as to how you plan to use GiNaC as a CAS for PDAs? GiNaC is meant to be used on a workstation with a c++ compiler, something I'm sure you will have a hard time getting to run on a PDA given the memory limits. Also, that would require a text editor etc. PDAs are notoriously hard to use for programming purposes, given they have a small keyboard (if they have one at all) and small screen. A completely different experience from working on a workstation, I can assure you. In fact, to make it useful on a PDA, the most important thing is actually a good user interface. And you will have a hard time designing a user interface that is different from the calculator metaphor. A calculator is not very suited for the more elaborate calculations, where you actually have to write a little program to solve the problem.
I disagree with this. I'm the main programmer of the HP49G and HP40G calculators CAS and I believe that a calculator is well suited for little programs, that's not much different from writing a small program in a CAS like Maple or MuPAD. The main problem with graphing calculators (especially the HP4xG) is the processor speed (about 1000* slower than my laptop), not the programming environment (e.g. you have a debugger, you can put breakpoints and exec your program step by step, and view the current stack). If we want to replace one day the proprietary CAS with GPL'ed CAS, we must start by providing a good solution for the educationnal market and the non-mathematician users.
Hmm, just don't know whether I'm kicking a dead horse here. It's an old thread. But really, I've been hacking on CLN/GiNaC support for ARM lately and they seems to fit well into quite old ARM computers. Many PDAs are running on such things. So, the portability is there and the machines are getting faster than what we see here: timing commutative expansion and substitution.... passed size: 25 50 100 200 time/s: 1.57 6.5 27.08 113.19 timing Laurent series expansion of Gamma function.... passed order: 10 15 20 25 time/s: 4.49 25.33 113.37 431.3 timing determinant of univariate symbolic Vandermonde matrices.... passed dim: 4x4 6x6 8x8 10x10 time/s: 0.13 1.26 13.63 125.07 timing determinant of polyvariate symbolic Toeplitz matrices.... passed dim: 5x5 6x6 7x7 8x8 time/s: 1.56 7.46 33.21 134.36 timing Lewis-Wester test A (divide factorials). passed 1.64s timing Lewis-Wester test B (sum of rational numbers). passed 0.28s timing Lewis-Wester test C (gcd of big integers). passed 1.56s timing Lewis-Wester test D (normalized sum of rational fcns). passed 30.24s timing Lewis-Wester test E (normalized sum of rational fcns). passed 26.44s timing Lewis-Wester test F (gcd of 2-var polys). passed 3.75s timing Lewis-Wester test G (gcd of 3-var polys). passed 81.24s timing Lewis-Wester test H (det of 80x80 Hilbert). passed 291.67s timing Lewis-Wester test I (invert rank 40 Hilbert). passed 104.21s timing Lewis-Wester test J (check rank 40 Hilbert). passed 68.17s timing Lewis-Wester test K (invert rank 70 Hilbert). passed 603.7s timing Lewis-Wester test L (check rank 70 Hilbert). passed 369.04s timing Lewis-Wester test M1 (26x26 sparse, det). passed 21.8s timing Lewis-Wester test M2 (101x101 sparse, det) disabled timing Lewis-Wester test N (poly at rational fcns) disabled timing Lewis-Wester test O1 (three 15x15 dets) disabled timing Lewis-Wester test P (det of sparse rank 101). passed 63.5s timing Lewis-Wester test P' (det of less sparse rank 101). passed 198.2s timing Lewis-Wester test Q (charpoly(P)) disabled timing Lewis-Wester test Q' (charpoly(P')) disabled timing computation of an antipode in Yukawa theory. passed 6261.38s Isn't it lovely? Almost 100 times slower than our workstations but still useful. Regards -richy. -- Richard Kreckel <Richard.Kreckel@Uni-Mainz.DE> <http://wwwthep.physik.uni-mainz.de/~kreckel/>