>>>>> "Richard" == Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> writes:
Richard> internally, b[n](x) is rather ugly, I think.
Richard> ((MQAPPLY SIMP) (($B SIMP ARRAY) $N) $X)
Richard> So other than the input/output hack,
Richard> it doesn't have much to recommend it.
No, it doesn't, but since that's what Macsyma uses, I guess we should
too.
Fortunately, li[n](x) exists, and that makes it easier for me to
figure out how to make this work. However, while looking over this
stuff, I see that maxima already has %j[n](x) defined, and also
%j(n,x). It doesn't do numerical evaluation, but it knows about the
derivatives.
Perhaps we should use %j instead of bessel_j? Or maybe convert %j to
bessel_j? If we're close to the release of maxima, I'd rather not do
the latter, because I haven't looked at how %j is used. Adding
bessel_j is safer since it's new and probably won't break existing
code.
Ray