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

[Kris K. <kat...@gm...>]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 08:52:54AM -0800, Raymond Toy wrote:
> >>>>> "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.

I vehemently agree.

Cheers,
Kris Katterjohn