I thought symbolic processing was done in polynomial representation, where the equation reduces to a matrix of coefficients that you operate on, so not so symbolic at all... Matlab tends to be one of the most used tools here (EEE at Imperial), Maple and symbolic tools are only used a very little. Matlab seems to be used because it supports matricies as primitives, has type coersion, and has a huge library of maths functions... This suggests rather than insuffient typing, a good standard matrix library which can be used as a basis for other maths libraries would be the best feature to adopt... Keean.