Re: [Maxima-discuss] display of large expressions

[Stavros M. <mac...@gm...>]

|    There used to be (but I can't find it!) a program to abbreviate the
display.

? pickapart


Though it could certainly be improved in many ways.

             -s

On Wed, Jan 18, 2023 at 1:40 PM Richard Fateman <fa...@gm...> wrote:

> Apologies for taking space on this discussion list for something that has
> already consumed too many messages.
>
> Large expressions (several pages long) are difficult to comprehend whether
> in '2d" or linear form.  Looking for the "/" to see where the denominator
> begins, or searching for the matching ")" may be important and yet
> difficult.  What to do?
> There used to be (but I can't find it!) a program to abbreviate the
> display.
> Thus we would see something like
> E = sum of 140 terms
>
> (Which can be examined by E[1], ... E[140]...))
>
> or E= product of...
> or quotient...
> etc.
> An alternative to E[140] might be something like
> ratcoef(E, x, 140)
>    etc.
> This kind of abbreviation was used recursively, e.g.
>
> E = ( product of 50 terms) + (product of 40 terms) + ..
>
> Linear output (as used by grind, or display2d:false) uses far less memory
> and computing, and so is faster and doesn't break things
> so much.  But really, other that to show we can do it, why display an
> expression explicitly that is many pages long?
>
> I recall that in the past I proposed a program that produced a spreadsheet
> instead of a conventional display. That is
> coefficient  |  x exponent | y exponent | ....
> 12345             3                     4    ...
>
> which is perhaps of some use to people who are more familiar with
> spreadsheets than (say) multi-dimensional arrays..
>
> Looking for the program, I came across Bruce Miller's paper on formatting
> expressions in Macsyma in various ways...
> https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/IR/nistir5618.pdf
>
> Even lacking access to the source code it should not be too challenging to
> (re-)implement these designs, should someone take on this project.
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