On Thursday 04 October 2001 10:48, you wrote:
> Right. As is it is very confusing for new users. I've looked over the
> primer and intromax.html quickly (more detailed reads will have to wait
> till after class) and both contain much good information. Probably the
> primer is the best place to start. One point - we probably need to
> distinguish between primer (quick intro) and user manual (more in
> depth, thorough instructions.) We should decide what we want in each,
> how much overlap their should be, and how to structure them. I'll look
> at some of the Mathematica stuff we've got lying around and see if I
> can get any good ideas on how to (or maybe how not to) structure this
> stuff - I would encourage everyone to brainstorm and let's see what we
> can come up with.
No brainstorm, just a breeze:
To me the real problem is that there seems to be such a lot of wrong
information and information I plainly can't understand (possibly because it's
based on wrong information). I try to learn to use Maxima (btw without trying
to do things in lisp, which seems to be one of my problems), I try not to
complain (it took me quite some time to more or less understand Mathematica,
and there was an excellent manual), but I have to say it's frustrating
sometimes. In my feeling the manual was written for a very different piece of
software, and anyway ias soon as you make a mistake you are sent to lisp. To
give one (my last) example: The description of the function radcan. At least
my version of maxima doesn't care at all if radexpand is true or not, those
examples (RADCAN(SQRT(1-X)) and RADCAN(SQRT(X^2-2*X+1))) give their
(reasonable) answers independent of what I do with radexpand.
J T
PS: My name is worse than yours, my J{u Umlaut}rgen nearly brought the server
of mathgroup down.