Newbie questions



> Are you trying to teach math or Lisp?  If the latter, I'd use just gcl
> (or clisp or cmucl since they're closer to ANSI CL).  If the former
> it's quite a bit harder to do it in Lisp, and I'd just use maxima
> abilities to define my own functions.

It is math. But I am not going to use Maxima as a calculator,  but as a 
programming environment where you can perform symbolical calculations.
Maple and its programming language woudl be very good for this but most 
unfortunately we cannot afford to buy a site license and Maxima would be 
free... (I have not tried MuPad, which would be free to some extent as well.)

That is, we would like to write programs, load them and make the functions we 
have written, like det and crossprod available from within Maxima.  Using 
builtin Maxima functions are not intended, this is not what I am after.

J.B.