[Axiom-developer] Re: OpenAxiom-1.1.0 released

[TimDaly]

On Feb 18, 1:37 pm, D Herring <address@hidden> wrote:
> Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
> > I'm pleased to announce that OpenAxiom-1.1.0 has been released on
> > February 14, 2008.
>
> Congratulations.
>
> I just installed Fricas a week ago...  Is there a document
> highlighting the differences between Axiom/Fricas/OpenAxiom for those
> of us "not in the loop"?
>
> Thanks,
> Daniel

Daniel,

The <a href="http://axiom.axiom-developer.org";>Axiom</a> release
information
is on the <a href="http://axiom.axiom-developer.org/axiom-website/
releasenotes.html">
release notes page</a>. The last release was January 25, 2008.

There have been two major concentrations of effort in this release.

The first concentration is on the new Firefox Hyperdoc and the
second concentration is the verification of Axiom against
published standards.

The orignial X11 Hyperdoc has traditionally been a major porting
problem and, although it was designed to be extended by users, it
never lived up to that promise due to the non-standard page language.
The new firefox browser-based hyperdoc uses standard html and AJAX.
This makes it portable, standard, and makes it possible to add new
pages.
Axiom has been extended to output mathML to the web pages for cleaner
display. The new firefox browser has additional new pages including
cryptographic course notes by Arthur Ralfs.

Axiom strives to be correct and an effort has been ongoing called
the Computer Algebra Test Suite (CATS) which shows its first fruits
in this release. Some existing functions have been verified against
published results and new functions (e.g. the Exponential Integral)
have been implemented and verified against published results. Since
all of the files are literate programs you can find the references
in the bibliography sections of the program files. Additional
regression test files have been added using the new regression
test mechanism.

As far as I'm aware there is no "PanAxiom" document that highlights
the differences. Where the systems diverge is based on the underlying
philosophy of the PanAxiom versions.

The bulk of the changes for Axiom have been in the area of
documentation (internal and external) and verification. Future
changes are certain to continue this trend as it speaks directly
to the underlying philosophy of making Axiom literate (in the
sense of Knuth).

Tim Daly