A survey of Poisson series processors

The sheer magnitude of the work involved in the construction of perturbation theories (the astronomical computations) made it inevitable that astronomers would very early become interested in the possibility of constructing them with the aid of computers. Since then general systems for symbolic manipulations have been developed and used widely. Nevertheless there still remain problems for which these general systems are not well adapted and many specialized systems of algebraic manipulation (mostly Poisson series processors) are in use. An attempt is made to review this field by sketching some of the ideas on which these Poisson series processors are built.