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 14/12/2015 23:06, Robert Dodier a écrit :
    >> I'm pushing the idea that pre/post super/subscripts are properties of
    >> indices. One would write x[i, j, k, l] (or whatever number of indices)
    >> and separately declare that the first index is a presuperscript, the
    >> second whatever, etc. That way (1) the computational properties are
    >> unchanges, and (2) any display system which doesn't know about different
    >> kinds of indices displays it as it does now. These both seem like a big
    >> win to me. What do you think?

    Michel> This seems like a very nice idea. Moreover this would open the way to an 
    Michel> automatic check that indices are properly contracted and summed, e.g.
    Michel> in general relativity computations.

Yes, that would be nice.

But I wonder how maxima (not wxMaxima) will display it.  Will it be

    i k
     x
    j l

Currently x[2]*y is displayed as

    x  y
     2

I think it would be hard to distinguish between x * y(pre-subscript
2):

   x  y
     2

The difference being where the extra space is.  This can be solved
with parens, but lots of parens makes it hard to read too (to match up
all the parens).

--
Ray