Name: James Amundson Date: 12/09/04-05:29:47 AM Z
Dear Rolf,
I won’t respond to all your points right now, but there is one issue
that seems worth discussing first: the speed issue. You wrote
> The last time I checked the open-source Maxima for speed it was at
least
> an order of magnitude
> slower for plain algebraic simplifications. Bearing in mind that
even
> Mathematca can become way too
> slow for research projects (see the enourmous calculations of Jos
> Vermaseren and friends which they
> have done over the last decades, using a special purpose system:
FORM),
> I really doubt that it will make
> much sense to reprogram much of FeynCalc into Maxima.
One reason a port of Feyncalc to Maxima interested me was the
potential
for speed. I have never done anything like a careful benchmark
comparison between Maxima and Mathematica. However, in the cases I
have
examined (which may not be typical) Maxima is *faster* than
Mathematica.
In fact, Richard Fateman has a paper where he compares the speed of
various CA systems on some simple polynomial operations. Maxima not
only
handily beat Mathematica, it also beat FORM. I don’t think Feyncalc in
Maxima should be dismissed on the basis of speed alone.
--Jim