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

[Robert D. <rob...@gm...>]

It occurs to me that another approach to generalized placement of
indices is to continue with trailing square brackets to indicate
indices, but then declare that some indices go before instead of after,
and some are above instead of below. So a variable with indices in all
four places would be entered as A[k, l, m, n] or whatever and then there
would be

 put (A, '[subscript, superscript, presubscript, presuperscript], 'display_indices);

or something like that. Of course not all indices need be present, e.g.:

 put (B, '[presubscript, subscript], 'display_indices);
 
for a two-index B[m, n], let's say. Pretty-printing display programs
(e.g. 2-d display in Maxima or wxMaxima's XML stuff or TeX) would look
for those properties and make use of them if present. Computational code
would have no idea such properties exist, as we would hope. Readable
output (i.e. 'grind') would be unaffected, again as we would hope.

I think a scheme like this would actually be pretty easy to implement.

best

Robert Dodier