Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!maytag!csg.uwaterloo.ca!giguere
From: giguere@csg.uwaterloo.ca (Eric Giguere)
Subject: Re: Maple V news for Amiga
Message-ID: <1990Nov14.051840.16031@maytag.waterloo.edu>
Sender: daemon@maytag.waterloo.edu (Admin)
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 90 05:18:40 GMT
Lines: 37

In article <stefanb.658363453@cip-s02> stefanb@cip-s02.informatik.rwth-aachen.de (Stefan Becker) writes:
>A Maple programmer told me that it doesn't use ANY floating point numbers. All
>math is done with fractions of two integer numbers.

Well, in most cases yes... Maple is above all a SYMBOLIC math package.  but
there are NUMERIC functions available and they use floating point... anyhow,
here's some info for you:


Good news for Maple fans... this evening we (the University of Waterloo
Amiga Users' Group) had a demo of the Maple V for the Amiga.  This is not
a beta or a product, it was just a demo of the current status of the
project.

Anyhow, the Maple kernel is definitely ported, as was mentioned before.
You could do all the usual stuff from the simple command line interface.
We were also shown a prototype for a smarter interface with a history
window, etc.  If you've seen the X Windows version of Maple V then it's
pretty close to that interface...

The interesting part of the demo were the graphics and plotting features.
A standalone program is responsible for that -- it will be communicating
with the kernel through IPC.  This all runs under 2.0 so they were using
gadtools for development (seems they found some bugs in gadtools though).
He showed us a graph with hidden surfaces being viewed in different positions
and so on.  It was all pretty neat.

A lot of work remains to be done, though, mostly on the user interface
and graphics portions.  A full ARexx port is going to be added... requirements
are Workbench 2.0, 2 megs of RAM and about 20 megs of disk space.  No one
knows what the price will be.

Neat stuff...

--
Eric Giguere                                       giguere@csg.UWaterloo.CA
           Quoth the raven: "Eat my shorts!" --- Poe & Groening
