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

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

My experience with most math students is that they want to learn as 
little as possible about the
computer system -- just enough to get the job done.  Learning extra 
syntax is considered
extra work, and who wants to spend time on extra work unless they get 
extra credit
or it is on the midterm.

And many people have trouble with knowing the precedence of a+b*c

So I doubt that typesetting subscripts is high on the list of learning 
objectives for
students who just want to get a passing grade on a required course, and the
wish to forget all about math.

Sad, but that's my experience.

Richard

On 12/14/2015 7:55 AM, Roland Salz wrote:
> 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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