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

[Roland S. <ma...@ro...>]

Michel, I get your point clearly. Most of you are professional users of
maxima and the last thing I want is to create problems to your work. Up to
now I did not know how professionals use maxima precisely, so now my
understanding is better. From what you said I assume that you would not use
wxmaxima at all as a user interface.

On the other hand I believe that a large number of users of maxima are
students who don't use it professionally as you do but to learn mathematics.
(So do I, by the way.) For instance, to my knowledge maxima is widely used
in high-schools in Germany, because it is powerful, fairly easy to learn (at
least the basics) and it is free. Lately I read a mail in German in
maxima-discuss, that seemed to me to have been posted by a high-school
student. Of course students will use maxima differently: for them a nicely
formatted output like the one from wxmaxima is worth a lot. They can solve
their exercises, print out the worksheet with the results and give them to
their teacher. They will not want to transform their output by tex or
anything. Let's not underestimate the use of maxima even for this kind of
users: who for instance today wants to do matrix multiplication or inversion
by hand, even in school? That's almost like trying to divide two rational
numbers with a sheet of paper and a pencil.

So let's take the perspective of such a student. He works with vectors and
matrices for example. He gets a specific basis of an E3-vector space called
<g bold subscript 1>, <g bold subscript 2> and <g bold subscript 3> and his
task is to calculate the dual basis <g bold superscript 1>, <g bold
superscript 2>, <g bold superscript 3>. None of these sub-/superscripts
denote any components of the vectors! Maybe <g non-bold> is also used. Maybe
metric tensors are involved, too: <g subscript ij> and <g superscript ij>.
Next he has to calculate a matrix <A subscript .j superscript i>, and so on.
Of course he can encode all that as (if he does not want to end up with
extremely long names) for example gb1, gbu2, g, gij, guij, A\.jui, etc. But
two days after he coded it this way, he will no longer be able to understand
his own notation. He would, however, if he could encode this stuff in maxima
in the same way as it was written in the exercise he got, that is, using
bold and having easy to enter, element-independent subscripts and
superscripts at hand. And everyone else in his class would, too. 

It's only for this type of application that my original proposal was meant
for. That's why my original idea was to keep the whole matter within
wxmaxima and not touch maxima itself and the other interfaces. The proposed
matters are only user-interface matters of this specific interface wxmaxima.
Actually, I would not consider it so much of a problem if such features
would be limited to wxmaxima. As long as they don't create conflicts within
wxmaxima itself, I think it should be ok. Such features could be marked
clearly in the documentation as only being applicable to wxmaxima. The
purposes of the different user interfaces are different, so I think a
certain amount of discrepancy would be tolerable.

Best regards,

Roland

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michel Talon [mailto:ta...@lp...]
> Sent: Monday, December 14, 2015 10:16 AM
> To: max...@li...
> Subject: Re: [Maxima-discuss] Encoding of bold, underscored, subscripted
> and superscripted identifiers by wxmaxima
> 
> 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
> 
> 
>
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