This is a document from the attic. The subject described here has been discontinued. Do not expect any further development, bugfixes or support.
What is Laplace ?
Laplace is a symbolic algebra program like Maple™ (ehem.. ;-)
It is still under development, so currently not many features are implemented.
But this will change in future releases!
Why should I use Laplace ?
Who told you, you should?? I did not...
I started Laplace, when I realized, that there was not a single application on AMIGA satisfying my wishes.
I needed something to work with matrices, but the problem of all other programs was that they use floatpoint, which results in quite large errors (2/3 is not 0.66666667), especially if you want to invert a matrix.
There was also no program able to properly handle constants and symbols, so Laplace was born..
I just saw that there is an AMIGA port of MuPAD (also it's currently not very comfortable..).
Well, Laplace cannot compete (in functionality) with MuPAD, I'm just a 2nd semester physic student wasting my free time in front of the computer and who knows what guys made MuPAD!!
But this won't stop me developing Laplace, first, because I think variety and competition increases software quality (especially this is valid Windoof and his friends), and second, because the work on Laplace is a good way of learning the stuff they tell me at the university.
Teaching is the best way of learning, particularly if you want to teach something to a stupid computer.
Which features offers Laplace ?
Functionality
- Laplace works fully symbolic
- basic matrix and vector manipulations
- derivations
- automatic gaussian error distribution
I know, this is not much for now. If you want more, buy Maple V.
Interface
- MUI 3.2 interface
- only help, including keyword search
- quite nice edit facilities (function and object popups, clipboard support, fkey shortcuts...)
- ARexx port
- english and german documentation as AmigeGuide, ASCII and DVI
What do I need to work with Laplace ?
- first of all an AMIGA (silly joke, I know..)
- 68020 CPU or better (no FPU required)
- OS3.0 (V39) or better
- MUI 3.3 (V12) or better (© by Stefan Stuntz)
- a faaast CPU (I did not test it on a '020, don't know how slow it is in fact.)
- much memory (I use VMem, so this is not the problem ;-)
The latest version of MUI is available on aminet. Download the file dev/gui/muiXXusr.lha, where XX is 33 or higher. If you are a coder, don't miss to get muiXXdev.lha, too!
Where do I get Laplace ?
The latest version of Laplace can be found at the AmiNet, in the directory misc/math/.