The commercial Macsyma has the functions:
READ_NUMERICAL_DATA,
READ_NUM_DATA_TO_MATRIX and
READ_NUM_DATA_TO_ARRAY.
Perhaps for compatibility, they should be reproduced.
Barton Willis wrote:
> I'm unaware of a Maxima function that reads data from a file and
> places the elements into a list or matrix. I'm assuming that the
> motivation is to import data from a spreadsheet or some
> other application.
>
> I can think of two approaches:
>
> (1) Define functions for reading a matrix, a list, and an array.
> The read_matrix function would read a line of the file and place all
> these elements in a matrix row; read_list would read elements and place
> them
> in a list (ignoring end of lines); read_array would be similar
> to read_matrix --- it would only work for one or two dimensional arrays.
>
> (2) Define one function that reads items from a file and places each
> item into a list. Then define a utility that converts a list to a
> matrix (either row-by-row or column-by-column, the user gets to choose)
> or an array.
>
> What do you all think? I suppose (1) might be better for reading matrices
> because the user doesn't need to know the matrix size (it's determined by
> how many elements are in each line). Or is there a Maxima function(s)
> that does these things already?
>
> Barton
>
> P.S. I see that yesterday I used cvs when I meant csv. Funny.
>
> Milan Lukic <lmilan@shell.core.com>
> Sent by: maxima-admin@math.utexas.edu
> 09/09/2003 11:31 AM
> Please respond to Milan Lukic
>
>
> To: maxima@www.ma.utexas.edu
> cc:
> Subject: Re: [Maxima] saving as CSV, eigensystem
>
> e-mail from the Maxima list). I am also wondering if we could read a
> data file into maxima, probably forming a matrix or an array. Say, you
> have a file data.txt such as
> 1 2 3
> 4 5 6
> 7 8 9
> ....
>
> Milan Lukic
>
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