I'm still collecting information about open source systems (so I can give a talk about them); and I've been looking at a few old test suites. On almost all of them Axiom does quite poorly, because it's a very different type of system to most, concentrating more on mathematical correctness of structures than on vast libraries of algorithms.
However, I was looking at denesting radicals. Axiom seems to be a bit hit-and-miss here; sometimes it can be made to produce a result:
(1) -> ex:AN = 6+2*sqrt(5)
(2) -> radicalSolve(x^2=ex,x)
(The command 'nthRoot(ex,2)' doesn't work here). But for other radicals nothing:
(3) -> ex:AN := 2*sqrt(21)+10
(4) -> radicalSolve(x^2=ex,x)
This doesn't produce sqrt(3)+sqrt(7).
Am I missing something here? Is there some clever way of denesting radicals?
In fact this is an area where almost all open-source systems do very badly. I've been experimenting also with Sage and with Maxima, and although the later provides a "sqdnst" package which includes a "sqrtdenest" function, it doesn't actually seem to work very well.
Second question: the hyper.h source file contains the font information for Hyperdoc, but the fonts listed "Rom14", "Erg14" etc don't exist on a modern Linux system. I suspect these are font names from old unices from the 1970s and 1980s (Sun, SGI etc). Now I can bodge up an .Xresources file containing my own fonts, but I'm wondering if there's a nice list of current Linux fonts that somebody else has put together for optimum viewing?