Re: [Maxima-discuss] Influencing the variable sort order

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

The ordering of alphabetic names depends on culture and context.  Issue
that might not be
evident to readers or computer algebra systems.
 Is it  a* x    or x*a ?  usually ax.
what about   a*p?    usually ap.
what about    a*m  usually am . Uh, no.  F=ma.

what about a^2*x  ,  uh, probably.
what about  c^2*m?   uh, E=m*c^2.

solutions.

1. tell humans that computers do it this way; human are flexible, live with
it.

or

2.  fiddle with ordering with more or less ugly fiddling in the command
sequence.
or

3. (offline) take the output from Maxima in TeX, and edit it by hand before
inserting into
a publication  [I have done this fairly often].

Ordering of terms is not the only kind of typesetting conventions that
might be
violated. So solutions 1 and 3 may be much simpler for the
author/programmer.

RJF




On Fri, Jul 14, 2023 at 11:51 AM Robert Dodier <rob...@gm...>
wrote:

> Wolfgang, thanks for your interest in Maxima, I'm glad to hear that it
> is useful in some way for practical engineering problems.
>
> About variable ordering, it is not altogether easy to get variables
> ordered in a way that seems obvious. For the most part, I accept the
> default ordering and try not to worry too much about it. I know that
> this is not a very satisfying approach.
>
> That said, try declare(ε, constant) before anything else. I find that
> makes ε go before other variables in expressions. Possibly declare(ε,
> scalar) would have the same effect.
>
> Something that may shed some light, here's a relevant passage in the
> description of orderlessp:
>
>      The canonical ordering of atoms (symbols, literal numbers, and
>      strings) is the following.
>
>      (integers and floats) precede (bigfloats) precede (declared
>      constants) precede (strings) precede (declared scalars) precede
>      (first argument to ‘orderless’) precedes ... precedes (last
>      argument to ‘orderless’) precedes (other symbols) precede (last
>      argument to ‘ordergreat’) precedes ... precedes (first argument to
>      ‘ordergreat’) precedes (declared main variables)
>
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> Robert
>
>
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