Generic, type-safe and object oriented computer algebra software

Abstract

Advances in computer science, in particular object oriented programming, and software engineering have had little practical impact on computer algebra systems in the last 30 years. The software design of existing systems is still dominated by ad-hoc memory management, weakly typed algorithm libraries and proprietary domain specific interactive expression interpreters. We discuss a modular approach to computer algebra software: usage of state-of-the-art memory management and run-time systems (e.g. JVM) usage of strongly typed, generic, object oriented programming languages (e.g. Java) and usage of general purpose, dynamic interactive expression interpreters (e.g. Python) To illustrate the workability of this approach, we have implemented and studied computer algebra systems in Java and Scala. In this paper we report on the current state of this work by presenting new examples. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.