SYPAC

Abstract

The motivations for developping a computer algebra system based on Pascal and running on a micro-computer are manyfold. A first one is to develop an experimental system capable of manipulating infinite precision integers and integer polynomials in the persperctive of pedagogical use at high school level. A second one is to have a laboratory for implementing in Pascal some of the ideas developed a few years ago by Loos for ALDES (1, 2). A third one is to have an easely portable system; to achieve this goal we use a common subset of two different versions of Pascal: UCSD (University of California at San Diego) Pascal and Wirth's standard one. This subset will be called minimal Pascal. The choice of UCSD Pascal is due to its segmentation capability which makes the portability on different computers easier. Furthermore this Pascal is easely available on many machines.