I'm trying to brush up on some higher math through
private reading and am looking to get a graphing
calculator to help me along.  The only calculators I've
used so far are "scientific" (ie, +-*/, trig, log, hyp,
and stats on single-var lists).  I like the promise of
visualizing complicated functions on the x,y-plane (or
x,y,z-space), and the ability to do numeric integration
and matrix manipulation, but I'm not really looking for
a "student" calculator, with menu'd lessons and such.
Also, I'd like a machine whose programming language is
as Scheme-like in feel, if not in syntax.  Is this too
tall an order?  If not, what brand/model would
you recommend?  Thanks.

--d  

ps: Does it have to be a calculator?  Yes.  My
discretionary reading time is rather scattered these
days and may not be near a real computer running
MzScheme, CLISP, Gnuplot and suchlike.

Try

Option 1:

http://www.lispme.de/lispme/

A Scheme system for the palm OS.  As for a graphing calculator, I do not
know.  In general, garphing calculators are extremely limited and can only
approximate an actual graph.  Sometimes its best to stick with the actually
equation and leave the visualization out of it.

Option 2:

Mathematica for the Palm??

http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/

Runs on Linux, was there not a PDA linux system somewhere?

Option 3:

Get a laptop  and install whatever you need.  Macsyma, Mathematica, ....
you get the idea.

Option 4:  (The best)

Higher mathematics reading usually does not need the use of a calculator.
Answers are always exact and learning to do everything by hand exercises the
brain.  I do not think Einstein or Gauss or Fermat or Newton or Laplace or
Poincare or Euler or Galois or Hilbert needed a calculator.  You probably do
not either.

Wade

It sounds like you've never used a graphing calculator...  One good one
is the TI-86, which provides just about anything you could want. (the
TI-89 and TI-92 have more, but are more complicated to use).  The TI-86
is not schemish at all (programming language much like BASIC).
However...  you could probably write a scheme interpreter in some
dialect of C, compile it to TI-86 machine code, and then transfer it to
the calculator....  There are compilers for this, but I have no info.
It is even possible that someone has already written a scheme
interpreter for the TI-86, but I wouldn't know about such things.

--
/Times-Bold 40 selectfont/n{moveto}def/m{gsave true charpath clip 72
400 n 300 -4 1{dup 160 300 3 -1 roll 0 360 arc 300 div 1 1 sethsbcolor
fill}for grestore 0 -60 rmoveto}def 72 500 n(This message has been)m
(brought to you by the)m(letter alpha and the number pi.)m(David Feuer)

No offense intended (and honestly, someone would have to be pretty
full of themselves for this to be offensive :), but I'm pretty sure
Dorai isn't quite an Einstein or Gauss.  If someone thinks that modern
technology can help them learn something better, well, I say they
should use it.  We live in the 21st century, we get get no choice
about the bad stuff, so we should take full advantage of the good
stuff.

You might want to check out HP calculators, they use a stack-based
postfix syntax.

No Macsyma.  It got reabsorbed into Symbolics who then stopped talking
about distributing it.  It *was* ported to Windows, Linux, Mac, and
misc Unices, as well as Genera.

Anyone heard the status of Macsyma lately?

'james

--

Lambda Unlimited: Recursion 'R' Us   |  |/  | USA, 61.2069 N, 149.766 W,
Y = \f.(\x.f(xx)) (\x.f(xx))         |  |\  | Earth, Sol System,
Y(F) = F(Y(F))                        \_,-_/  Milky Way.

<snip>

<snip>

Yes.  It's called the Agenda  (www.agendacomputing.com).  A friend of
mine has one and likes it.  I seriously doubt it has anywhere near the
processing capability necessary to run Mathematica (it has to be slow to
save battery power).  However, there is a scheme interpreter available
for it.  The scheme interpreter does not support graphics, but it is
open source, so it probably would not be _too_ hard to add minimal
graphics support. Of course, you'd have to write your own calculator,
but since you seem to like programming scheme, that shouldn't be a
problem  ;-).

--
/Times-Bold 40 selectfont/n{moveto}def/m{gsave true charpath clip 72
400 n 300 -4 1{dup 160 300 3 -1 roll 0 360 arc 300 div 1 1 sethsbcolor
fill}for grestore 0 -60 rmoveto}def 72 500 n(This message has been)m
(brought to you by the)m(letter alpha and the number pi.)m(David Feuer)

Cough, sputter, .......

SEEM to like programming in Scheme!  Aaaagh!  Of all the things to be tagged
with in this forum.

Not for a long time, CL forever! :-)  LOL

Wade

Silly, this is cross-posted to both c.l.scheme and c.l.lisp.  Not that
those pot-smoking communist hippie Scheme freaks care. ;-)

(all-praise-common-lisp?) => #t

'james

--

Lambda Unlimited: Recursion 'R' Us   |  |/  | USA, 61.2069 N, 149.766 W,
Y = \f.(\x.f(xx)) (\x.f(xx))         |  |\  | Earth, Sol System,
Y(F) = F(Y(F))                        \_,-_/  Milky Way.

http://www.ma.utexas.edu/maxima.html
Maxima is DOE Macsyma from the early 80s ported to Common Lisp.
Unfortunately the maintainer of Maxima and GCL, Bill Schelter, died
recently.

Tim

Cross posted!  

Hey no schemisms ------^ !

Wade

The HP 48GX and HP 49G calculators should be able to do everything you
want and more.  The 49G in particular has a fairly sophisticated
computer algebra system; a 48GX with some additional freely-available
software comes pretty close.  The programming language they use is sort
of an unholy combination of FORTH, Pascal, and LISP (they call it RPL
for "Reverse Polish LISP") but is very practical and flexible.

--
Steve VanDevender  "I ride the big iron"  http://jcomm.uoregon.edu/~stevev

Little things break, circuitry burns / Time flies while my little world turns
Every day comes, every day goes / 100 years and nobody shows -- Happy Rhodes

What about Audrey Jaffer's JACAL running on a laptop
or palmtop?

http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu/~jaffer/JACAL.html

Apparently, SLIB supports Pocket Scheme, so I suspect
that JACAL will run on Pocket Scheme on a Windows CE
PDA. But I don't have such a PDA myself; perhaps others
are willing to comment on this?

Hope this helps,

Stephan

For advanced mathematics on a small computer or handheld, have a look
at derive (http://www.derive.com).  It is a computer algebra system
which needs only a tiny amount of resources and even runs on dos.  It
is written in mulisp.

The HP calculater range uses RPL, which could be remotely considered
lisp - alike.

Marc

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
email: marc dot hoffmann at users dot whh dot wau dot nl
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HP48 has to be the obvious choice, if you want a calculator as such
(rather than something on a palm or so).  It's not Lisp/Scheme as
such, it's more like Forth-with-GC.  Things like Lists are a pain for
a Lisp person because they're not really linked-lists (you can't share
tails).  Against that it's completely programmable, and people have
done serious stuff for it, like non-trivial algebra systems.  You need
to get some of these packages rather than use the built-in stuff,
which is fine, but pales in comparison.  There is an *amazing* amount
of software written for these things. They are slow, and memory is a
lot (and you need some extra).  You want the GX model.

There's some newer one (hp49G) which may be better but I lost track of
things before it really came out.

HP's site is www.hp.com/calculators, the best user site I know is
www.hpcalc.org

--tim

At first I wasn't going to mention it, but people have been talking about
buying an Agenda PDA and writing up your own graphics support for some
PDA-scheme...

What I use as a calculator (and for graphing) is my Apple Newton
MessagePad 2000.  I'd go on and on about what I love about it, but I'll
save you that.  I use a package called LittleLisp
<http://www.adelaide.net.au/~dbenn/LittleLisp/LittleLispDocs>.  It has
some built in plotting and turtle graphics prims, so no need to add that.

I wrote my own plot function (10 lines long) as a quick hack.  I'll be
touching it up when there's an actual need to.  Quite rough compared to
even the graphing and zooming capabilities of a TI-82, but good enough for
me.  And besides, there's something fun about passing on a function as a
closure. :)

David Benn will be releasing LittleLisp under the GPL as soon as he
package and document the source some.  I'm planning on making it a little
more Scheme-like in it's naming conventions, and adding a fuller set of
standard functions.

Regards,
Aaron

  Aaron Reichow  ::  UMD ACM Pres  ::  http://www.d.umn.edu/~reic0024/
"life, probably the biggest word i've ever said, that says a lot,
becos there's a whole lot of words inside my head..."    :: atmosphere