neverendingbooks

sage

SAGE (which stands for ‘Software for Algebra and Geometry Experimentation’) includes and offers an interface to GAP, Singular, Maxima and even PARI as well as an interface to other packages such as Maple, Magma and Mathematica (see here for a full list of its features). More importantly, Sage offers a binary for both PPC and Intel-Macs! I did check this out and it runs without problems, in fact, after this initial check I installed from the sources on my MacBook Pro and after one hour of compiling I did have working (though not full) versions of GAP, Maxima and Singular. At first I was a bit worried that only small subsets of the three systems were installed, but it is quite easy to extend your Sage with additional packages. From the Unix-prompt do a sage -optional
and you will get a list of all (additional) packages you have already installed and those available for installation. SAGE is pretty well documented with tutorials and reference manual to be found here. Even if you do not want to learn (yet) the Sage-commands but just want to continue using the programs under its hood, this is pretty easy. For example, to get to Maxima, you only have to type !maxima from the sage-prompt to open up a maxima-session (and similarly for Gap and Singular).

Bill Schelter’s Affine-package is not included, but you can load and install it from the maxima-prompt by load("affine.lisp"); but some commands such as ‘fastcentralelements’ do not seem to work as expected (or maybe I forgot the drill over the years, I’ll try it out again).

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