The Altran system for rational function manipulation — a survey
Communications of the ACM
EUROSAM '79 Proceedings of the International Symposiumon on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation
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The supply of computer programs for algebraic calculation seems at present sufficient to satisfy the needs of any potential user (1). It would thus seem natural for a future user to ask for a copy of one of the existing programs. However, it turns out to be quite difficult in practice. Some algebraic systems are not distributed at all (MACSYMA (2) was until recently an example). Some others (e.g. SHEEP (3, 4)) exist only for definite types of computers, and adapting such a program to another computer is, for an inexperienced programmer, a task comparable in difficulty to writing a program from scratch. Several specialized programs will not be suited to the particular application intended. Finally, establishing a local group of experts in algebraic programming in a place where this activity was not represented before is an obvious (*) convenience for the users. Therefore we decided in 1977 to write our own program.