Re: [Maxima-discuss] about TeX output, was: :lisp (describe '$tex)

[Eduardo O. <edu...@gm...>]

On Sun, 16 Jul 2023 at 13:06, Robert Dodier <rob...@gm...> wrote:

> An equivalent definition, and somewhat shorter, is, I think,
>
> sa2 (name, ex) := printf (false, "~%\\sa{~a}{~a}", name, tex1 (ex));
>
> making use of built-in tex1 to produce a TeX string for ex, and ~% in
> printf to produce a newline.
>

Fantastic, thanks! I knew that it should be possible to rewrite my
idea using CL's format and tilde-expressions, but I left that to some
later version of the prototype... and I saw tex1 in src/mactex.lisp
but I forgot to test if it was also a Maxima function... =)


> By the way, is this something related to pedagogy? I forget whether
> you said anything about that already.
>

 Yes! In this semester in the class in which I teach integration and
basic ODEs I had both "advanced" students who want to learn Maxima
because it looks useful and fun and "basic" students who are still
struggling to distinguish the several ways of using "="-expressions -
"it is easy to see that", hypothesis, a guess that will be tested, "we
would like to have this", and so on... I prepared a few step-by-step
solutions of ODEs in which all the particles in Portuguese are
explicit and are used correctly, and now I'm working on the
translation of these step-by-step solutions to Maxima...

  Cheers =),
    Eduardo