On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Jay Belanger wrote:
> Ugh. My vote if for case sensitivity, but regardless, I'd like to
> see sin(x) as sin(x) and not SIN(X), etc. For some reason, seeing
> the output in all uppercase looks cheap to me. (Am I alone?)
> Probably because it reminds me of old DOS programs, but regardless,
> for purely emotional reasons, I'd like to see something done. The
> most reasonable thing seems to me to be case sensitivity.
My vote too, if you're counting the votes of new users :-)
Might I suggest something similar to *nix: although it'ss case sensitive,
in practice virtually everything is in lower case? I think that's easiest
to type, since you don't have to keep hitting the shift, or remember to
toggle the caps lock key when switching between a window with Maxima, and
windows with other apps.
Then the user would be free to use caps for variable names where they make
sense, or to e.g. have a standard diff function, and a Diff that is
somehow related-but-different.
Another suggestion that might be useful would be to allow variable names
to include Tex-style escapes for Greek letters and such, so you could
input something like "f:\alpha * x + \beta * y:", and a frontend could
render either the escape or a typeset character. Even if you're just
cutting & pasting the output from the tex () function, it would save some
editing...
James
PS: Where I come from, if you can do math beyond basic arithmetic, you ARE
a geek, almost by definition :-) So why worry about what non-geek users
want in an interface?