Re: [Maxima-discuss] Convolution and Plotting - bind stack overflow

[Robert D. <rob...@gm...>]

On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 12:35 PM Stavros Macrakis <mac...@al...> wrote:

> There appears to be a bug where maybe(x>NUMBER) adds a node to the assume database, which is silly since of course asking the question adds no information.

That behavior goes back at least to 5.9.1, which I was able to build
and run, and verified it has the same behavior wrt maybe(x > number).
But the code appears to be the same in Maxima 5.0 (with DCOMPARE
eventually calling DINTNUM) which dates to the 90s. So its an old bug.

My guess is that numbers get put into the database in order to
simplify queries. In order to compare a symbol to a number, put the
number into the database and then see where it ended up, relative to
the symbol -- this is my conjecture.

I have been looking at src/compar.lisp and src/db.lisp and puzzling
over some examples. I'm looking at two possible paths. One is to not
put the number into the database and somehow do the comparison. The
other is to clean up the database afterwards (maybe immediately
afterwards, or maybe some time later). I don't know how to do either
of those things yet.

Hope this helps,

Robert Dodier