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

[Raymond T. <toy...@gm...>]

>>>>> "Michel" == Michel Talon <ta...@lp...> writes:

    Michel> 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.

    Michel> In my opinion Maxima is a program for doing symbolic (and possibly 
    Michel> numeric) computations, and not a program to format nicely the input or 
    Michel> the output of these computations. For doing such computations it is not 
    Michel> necessary, and it is frequently inconvenient to complicate notation by
    Michel> using subscripts, boldface and so on. For example what do you lose
    Michel> by writing M1 or M_1 instead of M subscript 1 ? At the end of the day
    Michel> you write a paper with the result of those computations, and by 
    Michel> necessity you have to write it in TeX, and thus edit by hand those
    Michel> results. All the people i know who make heavy use of symbolic 

I agree with this approach.  I want maxima to be simple and not do all
that much formatting.  Let wxMaxima and other frontends do all the
pretty stuff.  Even then, it's not always what I want for publication
so I have to do lots of work anyway to get it done nicely.  Things
like 1 + x^2 vs x^2 + 1 depend on context and convention.

I don't have any objection if wxmaxima wants to take user input and
massage that into some kind of encoded variable name that maxima can
manipulate and that wxmaxima can decode to display things nicely.
Just don't make it a mess for users who don't use wxmaxima.

--
Ray