On Tue, 15 Apr 2003, Jesper Harder wrote:
> James Frye <frye@cs.unr.edu> writes:
>
> > 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:"
>
> This is already possible -- you just have to use a double backslash,
> e.g.
>
> (C1) f:\\alpha*x + \\beta*y;
>
> (D1) y \beta + x \alpha
>
> (C2) tex(%);
>
> $$y\,\beta+x\,\alpha$$
Hey, neat! That's what I call service, when you do my wish list BEFORE I
ask for it :-)
Seriously, though, doesn't something like this go a long ways towards
handling the non-ASCII character set problem? If Maxima could represent
such characters internally with e.g. the appropriate Unicode, and display
them according to whatever the current display can handle, then the big
problem for most of us is having a way to input them. My keyboard is
noticably lacking in Greek characters, and it's much easier to remember
\\alpha than whatever the multi-character escape code is...
James