[Stoves] What format for calculations?

[David G. LeVine]

At 05:59 PM 8/6/2007, you wrote:
>Scilab bills itself as "The open source platform for numerical
>computation". It aims to replicate the functionality of MatLab, but at
>no cost and without a restrictive license. It contains libraries of
>functions that deal with statistics, numerical differentiation and
>integration, solutions to differential equations, solutions to systems
>of linear or nonlinear equations, optimization, etc., as well as tools
>to produce graphs of 2-D or 3-D functions. The main thing it seems to
>lack is the ability to symbolically solve equations. There are official
>stable releases for Windows and Unix/Linux, and unofficial releases for
>Mac OSX.  More info and download links can be found at:
>http://www.scilab.org/

Just as a point to ponder, in third world countries, $1,900 may be 
many times a person's annual income, while an open source or freeware 
program may be affordable.  To get third world countries involved, 
using a format they can also use is probably a good idea.  If you 
were using spreadsheets, OpenOffice.Org has a clone of Excel which is 
pretty close and is free.


David G. LeVine
Nashua, NH  03060