Talk:FAQ

Concerning:

* will superseeker still work?
   * yes, eventually. Once the OEIS Foundation has received sufficient donations, 
     we'll purchase licenses for Maple and Mathematica, and move superseeker to oeis.org. 

It might be worth while checking for which purpose superseeker really needs Maple and Mmca. I think that for most numerical calculations, the free PARI software would do at least as good, and probably be much faster. The only (?) area where PARI has severe limitations is string manipulation. But some PHP scripts could easily cover the cases where this would be a major problem. As a conclusion, I hope that OEISF will soon be rich enough be able to buy these licences without problems, but even then, I think moving to a combination of PARI and PHP would be the best choice for the future. — M. F. Hasler 21:55, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

I agree that's worth looking into. I'm not an expert on superseeker, User:N. J. A. Sloane is. However, I believe that the main issues aren't numerical calculations, but rather symbolic. And, if memory serves me right, superseeker uses a couple of large libraries of transforms developed by other users in some of its tests, and porting those libraries to PARI may require significant effort. — David Applegate 15:56, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Superseeker works pretty well now, so I don't want to rewrite it in PARI. There are some additional programs that are waiting to be added (written in Python), once the wiki version of Superseeker is stable. Neil Sloane, Nov 05 2009

Too many FAQs

The various FAQs are confusing, especially if they use completely obscure names such as QandA For New OEIS. Can we merge the latter into the FAQ stub here?

The General disclaimer at the bottom of all pages is at the moment a redirection to Questions and Answers for OEIS License Agreements, maybe that should be swapped: Use the General disclaimer for the content, and redirect the old License QandA to this MediaWiki default page. At the end of the day precisely one FAQ should exist as project page in the project namespace for OeisWiki contributors, and maybe a second FAQ here in the main name space for issues relevant for OEIS users not interested in OeisWiki editing.

The corresponding system messages in the MediaWiki namespace are MediaWiki:faq and MediaWiki:faqpage, if you really like QandA better than FAQ that's the place to modify these system defaults.

–Frank Ellermann 03:01, 21 April 2011 (UTC)