Differences between Maxima and Macsyma and GPL vs. commercial version

>>>>> "Nikolaos" == Nikolaos I Ioakimidis <ioakimidis@otenet.gr> writes:


    Nikolaos> Info from file C:/MAXIMA/MAXIMA/info/maxima.info:
    Nikolaos>  - Function: FIRST (exp) SECOND (exp) .. TENTH (exp)   . . .

    Nikolaos> in my opinion, this is not sufficient.)

    Nikolaos> This is related to the fact that the manuals of Maxima do not include 
    Nikolaos> all of the available commands and this constitutes a difficulty for the 
    Nikolaos> user. (I repeat I have learnt on the availability of the command third
    Nikolaos> through a student's notebook. It seems not present in the manuals.) 
    Nikolaos> I can also add that this command is also not present in the commercial 
    Nikolaos> Macsyma Reference Manual, version 13, Nov. 1988, simply since, 
    Nikolaos> clearly, it has been added later even in the commercial Macsyma. 
    Nikolaos> (Analogously, for all of the commands second up to tenth.)

I've noticed these kinds of things.  It's quite annoying.  

Since maxima uses Lisp, and Lisp has doc strings for functions, I've
always thought describe should look there instead of some mostly
out-of-date info file somewhere.

After all, emacs does this pretty well---the manual may be
out-of-date, but the docstrings are still there to look at.

I think it would be relatively easy to get describe to look for
docstrings for things that don't exist in the info files.  Then it's
just a matter of getting docstrings into the (very many) individual
functions. :-)

Ray