Re: symbolic math in octave

[George White]

In order to have symbolic math in octave, a GNU licensed symbolic math
engine is needed.  Such an engine does exist (maxima, a fork of Macsyma),
but it seems to need a BSD-hosted clisp to run.  Since maxima is
potentially a valuable tool, I hope someone will make it easier to use on
modern systems.  Maxima does have reasonable plotting with PostScript
output, and can convert expressions to Fortran code.

The problem remains that running two interpreters (octave and the lisp
host for maxima) requires lots of memory (maxima is a big package). 
Since many octave users are financially constrained, symbolic math may be
a stretch (it certainly isn't feasible to run maxima and octave on our
m68k NeXT systems with 16M Ram!). 

--
George White <address@hidden>  tel: 902.426.8509
  Bedford Inst. of Oceanography, Nova Scotia, Canada.