Re: [Aimmath-developers] authoring tools and other mods

[Greg G. <gr...@ma...>]

On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, Ken Monks wrote:
> I just committed all of the stuff I had been working on for the past couple
> of weeks.  Most of it consists of question authoring tools.  Most if it is
> also rather harmless, in that if you don't use it in writing your questions
> it shouldn't break anything.  However, there are a few things that could
> affect the LaTeX formatting of the mathematics in existing questions (though
> I hope in most cases it will be for the better). If there is some change you
> don't like, let me know and I'll do a feature-ectomy on that item.  See
> below for details.
> 
> COMMITTED CHANGES: Sep 1, 2003
> ------------------------------
> 
> * Added the following files:
> 
> 1. aim/Inert.mpl
> 
> This file contains a package called 'Inert'.

This is interesting, but my thinking at the moment is that I'll still
want the ad> tag ... but I'm not sure I've got my head around all the
things this new feature can do.

> 5. aim/admin/CompileSubject.mpl
> 
> I got sick of going around to each of my quizzes and recompiling all of the
> questions when I made significant changes to the code to see if the
> questions all still compile, so I wrote a new admin command called
> CompileSubject that compiles all of the files in all of the question source
> directories of all of the non-hidden quizzes in a given subject.  I also put
> a link to this on the subject admin page.  If you think this is too
> dangerous of a command for the ordinary AiM user to have access to, we can
> always delete the link to it from the subject page and just call it from a
> shortcut externally or something.

Ahh! ... I've wanted to be able to do all the GUI things from Maple after
reading in Console.mpl. I can see myself wanting to do all manner of
sequences of commands via a single script. This is great!!! Thanks Ken.

> 9. AliceServer.mpl
> ... 
>    + define e:=exp(1) globally. Note that this means you probably can't use
> e as a local variable in your AiM questions. On the other hand both you and
> the students can use e^x for exp(x).

I'm a bit unsure of this one. This seemed to create problems for me in the
past ... so I have tended to list e among the locals of questions that use
e and have a marking algorithm starting like this:

[ proc(ans)
    local ans_;
    ans_ := simplify(subs(e = exp(1), ans));
    ...

A bit tedious I know ... but it did the trick.

Thanks for all the other new stuff ... it looks great.

  Regards,
  Greg