Re: [Maxima-discuss] Encoding of bold, underscored, subscripted and superscripted identifiers by wxmaxima

[Richard F. <fa...@be...>]

On 12/12/2015 9:49 AM, Gunter Königsmann wrote:
...

>
> What I would still be slightly afraid of in case we decide to use
> subscripts in a notation that is currently legal in maxima is: Nothing
> makes all maxima-related projects use the same notation -

Maxima provides facilities for extending the syntax, so a user could, in 
principle, add operators
like &&&.
by
infix("&&&");

a&&&b:= a^3+b^3;

I point this out so you consider:   people can already have incompatible 
syntax extensions,
so two users working in isolation can have
(incompatible) function names -- re-use with different definitions
(incompatible) definitions of operators
different assumptions on variable names
  (etc).

A package system can address some of these issues, but at least my 
experience
with the common lisp package system, is that it can be painful to use. 
Maxima documentation has
only vague guidance about what names mean when they are bound locally,
or implicitly like in sum(...., i...)   or integrate,   or by patterns, 
or by declarations.

You can still do something useful, even if a user might mess up.  He can 
already mess up.
\
Richard