Design Quality

"Mathematica's rich set of built-in functions, its symbolic and numeric flexibility, its full-featured graphics and visualization capabilities, and its convenient, interactive, self-documenting notebook environment have been crucial to a concise, clear, and timely treatment and demonstration of several critical design issues in many of the feasibility studies I have conducted." Sam M. Daniel Member of Technical Staff Motorola Communications Systems Division Scottsdale, Arizona

We spent a decade making sure that Mathematica's capabilities all fit seamlessly together. Database manipulations, statistics, time series, graphics, and even exotic new techniques like wavelet analysis can all be handled in one comprehensive package using a single programming language. Mathematica will even document all your work in a presentation-quality, automatically formatted notebook, so you will never lose information or write up reports from scratch again.

Compatibility

Unlike many software packages and programming languages, Mathematica is one hundred percent cross-platform compatible. This means that you can continue to use it without costly porting or reengineering, no matter what your computing environment will look like in the future. To switch to a different computing platform (for example, from VMS to Unix, from Unix to NT, or from NT to Linux), simply move your files to the new location and you will be up and running. Wolfram Research also pays great attention to backward and forward compatibility. Almost all programs that were written for Mathematica 1.0 over 10 years ago still work flawlessly in Mathematica 4.0. How many systems and programming languages can claim that? Furthermore, due to our design guidelines, you can be sure that any program you write today will be working for years to come.

Quality Assurance

Wolfram Research's software quality assurance program is one of the most sophisticated in the industry. Every week throughout the development process, Mathematica is subjected to an extensive battery of manual and automated testing, including comparisons of nearly a half million computations (chosen from books of tables, bug reports, documented behavior, and other Wolfram Research-generated tests) with known results. Mathematica's ability to solve many problems in a variety of different ways (thereby allowing self-checking), automatic numerical precision control, and testing by the more than one million people who have used Mathematica contribute further to its robustness. Because Mathematica is now viewed as a standard for reliability, many major companies specifically test their products against it.