ANNOUNCE: PySymbolic - Doing Symbolics in Python

[Huaiyu Zhu]

On Wed, 11 Oct 2000 15:43:22 GMT, Victor S. Miller <victor at idaccr.org> wrote:
>
>Pearu, There are two very mature and quite excellent libraries for
>doing symbolic calculation.  Both are available with the GPL.
>The first (and oldest) is Pari (see http://www.parigp-home.de).  Pari
>was originally intended to be a comprehensive C library for symbolic
>calculation (polynomials power series, factorization, etc. etc. --
>there's an incredible amount there).  The interface GP was written as
>a quick weekend hack to test the library.  However, it was
>sufficiently powerful as a programming language (though with rather
>unpleasant syntax).  So it's become the "standard" way of unsing
>libpari.  The big work to integrate it with Python is that Pari does
>it's own storage allocation (so one would tediously need to change all
>of those references).
>
>The second (and newer) is LiDIA from University of Darmstadt
>(http://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/TI/LiDIA/).  It's free for
>non-commercial use.  It's written in C++.  It has pretty much the same
>capabilities as gp (plus some more).  It would also be much easier to
>integrate into Python (I think) since it has a clean interface to a
>storage allocator (you can put in your own), and all other hooks to
>the system.

I just glanced over their pages.  They both claim to be computational
number-theory packages, which doesn't sound like they will have any calculus
stuff.  I checked GiNaC again.  It has symbolic differentiation, but no
symbolic integration, either.  Are there better candidate packages?

Considering the existence of many low level packages, we might want to ask
ourselves the question: what do we want the expressions look like in Python
eventually? Maple? Mathematica? Or something completely different?

Huaiyu