Wondering about nice little numeric exercises to help introduce Axiom to a small group of students, I attempted to sum the first 20000 reciprocals:
reduce(+,[1.0/i for i in 1...20000])
This works, but is (I think) unreasonably slow; it takes over 21 seconds on my computer. The equivalent command in Maxima takes less than 1 second. Is there any way of encouraging Axiom to be faster here?