Dear Nikolaos,
>
> > (c) letting the user put text that is not meant for maxima
> > somewhere between the formulas.
>
> > - xmaxima
> > I like the ability to display help below the actual interaction.
> > As far as I know, it has no support whatsoever for doing (1)
>
> I would like to clarify that XMaxima is completely able to permit the
> user to add actual text (not just Maxima comments) between commands
> or even between a command and its output with the exception of the
> line after the last command of a session so long as it remains the last
> command (although this text is NOT saved in a sav file to be reused
Thanks for mentioning it, I was not able to try it out because xmaxima
wouldn't run (with sbcl) and I didn't find out why.
And yes, support of multiple languages/charsets is an issue too. As you
said, Xmaxima supports it, TeXmacs is supposed to do so too (I've only
once tried typing russian words, and it worked) and emaxima/emacs should
too.
> > - TeXmacs
> > is probably not exactly what you want for (1), since you cannot put text
> > between the lines of a maxima session
>
> Is this last negative comment really true? (This can easily be done with
> XMaxima as I mentioned just above.) I cannot believe it!
Well it seems to be more a feature-bug of the maxima interface. You cannot
select anything between the lines of the interaction, you can edit
(and select) things in the expression, but as soon as you re-evaluate the
command that generated this expression, the changes get replaced with the
result of the evaluation.
My thought was that it should be possible to extend the
TeXmacs/maxima-interface so that it does things more like emaxima with
emacs, but I'm not so familiar with TeXmacs that I could say how much work
it is. Additionally, TeXmacs currently only runs with the X Window system
(that means that you have to install XFree86 on MacOSX or MS Windows).
> Finally, I would also like to be able to make additional computations
> between the commands, not only at the end of a session. This is not
> possible in XMaxima (a new command only at the end!). Where is
> this possible?
Well, with TeXmacs you can change a previously entered command and
evaluate that, but you cannot insert new commands either.
If I read the emaxima documentation right, it should allow that. With the
capability of rendering equations and displaying them instead of the TeX
code, it sounds really nice (but I didn't try it out yet).
> My conclusion is that XMaxima (in spite of its serious disadvantages)
> already constitutes an almost perfect environment for me to prepare
> high-quality LaTeX mathematical documents computationally based
> on Maxima.
I agree.
Regards,
Yannick