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

[Michel T. <ta...@lp...>]

Le 13/12/2015 23:55, Roland Salz a écrit :
> The user, as far as I see, has to always be aware of these types of
> conflicts arising when he wants to use the present mechanism for
> encoding subscripted names. That is what I mean by not satisfactory.
> Best would be, if these conflicts could not arise at all. But then these
> “independent” (not denoting elements) subscripts would have to be
> encoded in a principally different way.

In my opinion Maxima is a program for doing symbolic (and possibly 
numeric) computations, and not a program to format nicely the input or 
the output of these computations. For doing such computations it is not 
necessary, and it is frequently inconvenient to complicate notation by
using subscripts, boldface and so on. For example what do you lose
by writing M1 or M_1 instead of M subscript 1 ? At the end of the day
you write a paper with the result of those computations, and by 
necessity you have to write it in TeX, and thus edit by hand those
results. All the people i know who make heavy use of symbolic 
computation (be it in maxima, maple or mathematica) use the following
workflow: type the command in a text editor (vi, emacs, etc.) copy
paste in a console running the computation, modify the command in the 
editor if one is not happy with the result, and iterate. This is the way 
to get a clean copy of all the steps involved. Sometimes the computation 
will run for hours or even days, you don't want to be at the mercy of a 
bug in the windowing system. This means that for such serious use, 
things such as wxmaxima, maple spreadsheets, etc. are more
a hindrance that an asset. I agree that it is easier to examine a long 
result when is is nicely formatted in TeX form than in the standard 2d
display. There is always the possibility to run the maxima session under
emacs and imaxima to do that. I know several physicists who still prefer
using reduce, which is very good for the computations they are doing
(apparently far better than maple or mathematica) and outputs all the 
results in TeX form. Anyways if your result is a big fraction with very 
long numerator and denominator, you will be screwed because there is no 
way to display the fraction on a line (although imaxima works hard to
fit the result on lines).

-- 
Michel Talon