On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
> I am not sure what you mean by "assigning a result to a prompt". Maxima
> assigns a name to your input (and uses that name as the prompt), and to
> the results of evaluating the input (and labels the output with its
> name). Do you just find it strange that it assigns a name to the
> *inputs*, or both the inputs and the outputs?
Both. It's all pretty non-obvious to me, starting with the use of C and D
as input & output labels :-) I can see the point of getting previous
input to edit, in case I make a mistake or want to make minor changes, but
IMHO that's much easier to do with the normal command recovery - just hit
the up-arrow key a few times.
As for the outputs, maybe this is just my ignorance showing, but it seems
that maxima seldom if ever returns results in a form that could be used
directly in another expression, or easily edited.
> Another useful thing about saving the inputs is that Maxima can
> pretty-print them for you, which helps in finding errors sometimes, or
> simply in showing them to others. Unfortunately, Maxima's
> pretty-printer could be better, but....
How? I've tried doing TEX (expression), and then feeding the result into
Latex, but it seldom works. Don't know if it's me, or what.
> In other words, I don't know in advance which results will be useful and
> which will not -- most *might* be useful, and even if I abandon one line
> of work temporarily, I may go back to it later. Even in the days when
> Maxima ran in 1 MB of memory, we found it useful to save results.
> Nowadays, with basically unlimited memory, I see no reason at all to
> throw away results.
Which is one reason I've been doing the edit file, then batch thing.
Plain Maxima doesn't seem to have any way to save interaction in a
readable format, and xmaxima doesn't seem to have working command-line
editing & recovery, so what I wind up doing is using plain Maxima with
batch, and possibly some interactive modification to experiment. Then
when I have a final result I'm satisfied with, I re-run the batch file in
xmaxima, save the output to a file, which I then edit & print.
> I do STRONGLY believe we can improve on Maxima's interaction paradigm --
> something better than both C1/D1 and workbooks -- but I am still working
> on that....
Me too. I've been playing with it a bit in my (hypothetical!) spare time,
trying to get it so it can be called from within my editor and output
results to a file.
James