OK, Martin,

I understand that the OFFicial release may be limited in what Matlab, Maple, Maxima...
had allowed to be distributed vs the UNofficial release that is for personnal use of
restricted distribution. Also, I understand that the UNofficial is so full of stuff
of advanced maths so that a more immediate/simpler version is for Smath beginners.

All that said is fine.

That the UNofficial does not have the Maple [maple(,)], does not have Matlab [mwxxx]
does it means these two [Maple, Matlab] did restrict or simply the link is missing,
or that these two [Maple, Matlab] would conflict with other UNofficial librairies
... maybe the Maxima.

In some ways Smath different releases end up not convenient, a bloody mess.
Maple, Matlab, and mostly Mathsoft/Mathcad emerged in the same period. Many, very many
Edu. invested $ to make them profitable with practical results and became religion.
Smath in its limbo state of releases has no interest for Edu. institutions.

Have a freeware "OFFicial release" ... as actually
Have a $ release for a more "Smath Engineer" oriented product... at fraction of
PTC Mathcad.

If Maple, Matlab have restricted their access to the UNofficial release,
How much $ these two do they want ?

Next: Davide Carpi "cases" gives Smath a new dimension. That this code is not
available in the "Smath OFFicial installed release" makes no sense to me.

Thanks Davide for your so precious contribution.
I must "cogitate" more about "Samth for Engineers"

Jean



Spline Quadratic [UN].sm (66 KiB) downloaded 26 time(s).

Neither the lack of cases() in the official distribution nor the lack of maple() and matlab stuff in the unofficial distribution are real limitations of these distributions. As Davide has already explained to you, you always can add the required plugins via extension manager. Usually it is sufficient to load a document containing these functions. Upon saving, SMath keeps a record of which plugins are required for this document. If the requirements are not met upon loading the document into another installation, you are offered to install the missing plugins. That should be easy enough.

Neither matlab nor maple are freeware or open source. The matlab lib comes with the matlab compiler toolbox and if you bought that compiler, you are allowed to distribute the executable along with the runtime environment (which includes the lib). F*** the Smileys. you can use the [noparse] tag to suppress them

Use of this runtime environment is restricted to the execution of matlab generated executables by the license conditions of matlab (at least that was the state 6 years ago when I created a compiled matlab application).

The kernel of the maple plugin is an old dos version of maple, which to my knowledge has never been released as freeware.

There are absolutely no technical restrictions to use these plugins in all types of SMath distributions. If you feel brave enough to not care copyright, you are free to do so. There should be no conflict with Maxima (except perhaps due to bugs).

I am working an a german university of applied sciences and I am obligued to obey the law. The maxima plugin was created to provide CAS functionality to SMath in a legally clean way. I have not the slightest interest in semi-commercial solutions. I want to be free to provide the tool without any restrictions to students and customers. I make heavy use of SMath in classroom and in performing and documenting technical calculations.

The maxima plugin is out of maintenance not because I think it is bad stuff but due to lack of time (and unavailability of the original programmer). The seamless integration (hijacking SMath native calculus functions) is really convenient and the plotting functions are rather flexible and straightforward to use.

As soon as there is a chance to spend some months on this, I might revisit the plugin. The current state might be considered as demo or proof of concept.