Dear James,
Dear Colleagues,
Generally, I agree with James.
My practice, as one more new user of Maxima, is also not to
use the Cn and Dn prompts neither the previous commands
% symbols. In most cases (in most lines I mean), I give explicit
names to the results of Maxima (equations, solutions, verifications,
etc.) so that I can recall them later. Moreover, in few cases,
such as in constants of differential equations, I would like to
have the symbols C1, C2, etc. free to be used.
There have been several ideas which would permit me to be
able to use Cn and Dn in my tasks (especially Cn). Since I use
only names for the results of Maxima, I am not particularly
interested in which suggestion will be finally adopted.
On the other hand, contrary to James, I do not use batch files, but
I like to delete incorrect or incomplete commands in a Maxima
session. Therefore, the sequence of commands is essentially lost
since several commands (all the not completely satisfactory ones)
are deleted (after a satisfactory repetition) and finally missing from
the Maxima session transferred to LaTeX.
Finally, when preparing something more official (such as solved
exercises for the students) a special LaTeX counter for Maxima
commands permits me to present the final session in an acceptable
form (as if it had been produced by Maxima directly), but it is
understood that no Cn and Dn symbols appear inside my commands
themselves. This LaTeX counter is put back to zero (essentially to
one) when I begin a new section, subsection, exercise, etc. I
believe this is a standard approach as an alternative to batch files,
which are much more official.
This is my present policy and I am satisfied with it. Any change
in Maxima so that I could possibly use Cn and Dn would be a
help for me especially in differential equations with C-constants
there.
This is my personal opinion. Many thanks and best regards from Patras,
Nikos
> --- "James Frye" <frye@cs.unr.edu> wrote:
> Just to kick in my two cents worth, to me, a new user, the whole idea of
> assigning a result to a prompt seems rather strange. Is it really all
> that useful? After all, if you want to assign a result or an input to
> a variable for later use, you can (I think, anyway), but most of the lines
> entered would probably not need to be recalled by name. Seems like any
> convenience would be outweighed by the potential for confusion, as in Cn
> being common usage for constants.
>
> Not to mention that it's completely useless when you work as I have been,
> editing the Maxima source in a file, and then batching it.
>
> James