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[previous article]Vaxima is the Berkeley VAX/UNIX version of the M.I.T. MACSYMA program. MACSYMA (Project MAC's SYmbolic MAnipulation System) is a large computer programming system written in LISP used for performing symbolic as well as numerical mathematical manipulations. It is being developed by the Mathlab Group of the M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science (formerly Project MAC).
With MACSYMA the user can differentiate, integrate, take limits, solve systems of linear or polynomial equations, factor polynomials, expand functions in Laurent or Taylor series, solve differential equations (using direct or transform methods), compute Poisson series, plot curves, and manipulate matrices and tensors. MACSYMA has a language similar to ALGOL-60 to permit the user to write his own programs for transforming symbolic expressions.
Version 2.10 of vaxima uses Version 302 of MACSYMA from January of 1983. The previous version used Version 267 from December, 1977. Users who have used vaxima before will probably not notice many differences, except that quit(); must now be used to exit instead of exit(); . The only other noticeable difference is that this version of vaxima comes with all the ``share'' directories of user-contributed subroutines; the previous version was lacking these.
There is also a new version of the manual, Version 10 (the previous was Version 9). All ECN site specialists with vaxima installed on their machines have copies of the new manual which you can use. At present, the manual is not for sale in the Armory; this may change if the demand is great enough.
Because of its size, vaxima is not installed on all machines. It is presently installed on the aa, ab, cb, ea, ec, ed, eg, gb, ka, and ma machines. Because it uses Franz Lisp, vaxima cannot be installed on the Gould machines (Franz Lisp does not run on Goulds). It may be possible to install vaxima on Sun workstations, but this has not been tested. If you require vaxima for your research and believe you need it on your Sun workstation, please contact your site specialist.
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