29.5 years of Maple: how many of the design principles of the system paid dividends
Gaston Gonnet (ETH Zürich, Switzerland)
Most of the original literature about Maple described it as a "compact and efficient computer algebra system". It was partly our goal to be able to run in small desktop computers and even on a pocket computer (the term "pocket symbolic" was also used). This talk will concentrate on four aspects of the early design that went in this direction and were the cornerstones of the design. These are the use of the language C, the S2T measure of complexity, option remember and its implication which is the unique representation of subexpression and the systematic elimination of quadratic algorithms.
Talk slides (PDF).