Combinatorics

[Robert Dodier]

Cameron Laird wrote:

> Should combinatorics be part of the standard library?  That's
> an aesthetic-pragmatic question I don't feel competent to
> answer; I look to timbot and Guido and so on for judgment there.
> It does occur to me, though, that even more widely applicable
> than the combinatorics module of Mathematica (if only because of
> its licensing) might be such resources as
[...]

Well, since Mathematica has been mentioned, I'll go ahead and
mention Maxima as well. Maxima is an open source (GPL) symbolic
computation system, which includes some functions for
combinatorics, among many other things. The relevant code is:
http://maxima.cvs.sourceforge.net/maxima/maxima/src/nset.lisp
(Oh, btw Maxima is written in Lisp.) The relevant documentation:
http://maxima.sourceforge.net/docs/manual/en/maxima_37.html

Sage can presumably access Maxima's combinatoric functions
(since Sage bundles Maxima along with other programs).
I don't know if there are combinatoric functions from other
packages in Sage.

FWIW

Robert Dodier