"Stavros Macrakis" <stavros.macrakis@verizon.net> writes:
> So to answer your question, of course I would do something different
> from Common Lisp. Maxima users' expectations are *not* set by Common
> Lisp, and the design goals of the two languages are very different.
>
> Maxima users are familiar with other languages they use, including
> conventional mathematical notation, other symbolic systems (Mathematica,
> Maple), and numeric systems (Fortran, Matlab, Java, Perl, Python, Excel
> (!), etc.). If we're going to introduce new notations, we should look
> at these and other languages as a model, not at Common Lisp.
I can't speak on behalf of Maxima users in general, of course.
Of the languages you mention I've used Fortran, Mathematica, Matlab
(Octave, actually), Maple and Lisp. And I, for one, would strongly
prefer the Maxima language to be much more Lisp-like.
I like Mathematica better than Maple exactly because the Mathematica
language is more aligned towards a functional programming style than
Maple.