Path: utzoo!attcan!telly!lethe!torsqnt!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!purdue!gatech!psuvax1!psuvm!cunyvm!byuvax!smithw
From: smithw@yvax.byu.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Mathematica (NeXT 1.0)
Message-ID: <811smithw@yvax.byu.edu>
Date: 22 Sep 89 03:41:33 GMT
Lines: 29


  I have some interesting problems with mathematica to report.  I'd be
interested to hear from anyone who has found others.  My machine is
the 8 MB od only version.  I've noticed problems with memory before
when running mathematica.  Today I tried finding the inverse of a
certain symbolic matrix.  I watched the memory with ps -xva.  The program
seems to hang onto disk space once it is used for swap and never lets go.
When the thing really got going, it wouldn't even let me kill it with
the skull and crossbones.  I got some failure panel for the abattoir.
The swapfile increased in size to about 32 MB and when I was finally able
to kill the process from shell it kept the space anyway (not quite the
definition of swap is it? But wait...)  I tried to copy some of the ps
output to writenow but there was not enough space to open it(wn).  I tried
edit, but not enough space to save the file.  I logged out.  Then back
in to get a message to the effect that my disk space was very low.
The doc tried to do its thing opening term, shell and wn but not enough
space.  I logged out and turned the machine off.  When I got back up,
the doc was empty except for the next block at the top...It seems to me
this is a very LARGE bug that makes it well nigh immpossible to use
mathematica for anything significant.  Any hope of fixing it soon?
Are you listening NeXT??  And yes I did repeat this with the same results on
another cube.  HELP!  I need this thing to do symbolic stuff.  It doesn't
even have to do it very fast...just correctly.  How about porting
MAPLE to the cube?? I'm stuck with the cube for a while since I had
to do some ranting to get one in the first place.  Come on guys,
make me happy...just a little bit??  Oh yeah, mathematica has some other
bugs.  The Eigensystem command fails on most anything you want to try...
For instance the matrix {{1,2,3},{a,0,0},{1,2,3}}. Gee, this one I
can do by hand in a few minutes...HHHHEEEEEELLLLLLLPPPPPP!!!!!!!

Bill Smith
smithw@yvax.byu.edu