On Fri, 2004-08-06 at 10:16, Richard Fateman wrote:
> Customary is (in order)
> 1. ignore the possibility of name conflicts
> 2. use strange prefixes.
>
> This is not ideal.
> >unless I have read the documentation wrong, there is nothing like
> >packages or namespaces etc. in Maxima. So what do you do to keep
> >auxiliary definitions from getting into the way of the user? I can
> >see these possibilities:
Sooner or later we are going to have to add a few features to the Maxima
language. I really don't want to get into a long debate about what
features should be added at this time. I'm not sure when we will be
ready to tackle extending the language, but it won't be for a while yet.
However, I think it would be useful to compile a list of features that
have been requested, or at least mentioned, in the meantime.
The obvious items:
1) Optional arguments to functions. (We actually already have these, but
only for Maxima functions written in Lisp.)
2) Named optional arguments to functions.
3) Packages/namespaces.
I have a few other possibilities in mind:
4) Real strings.
5) Numerical vectors, matrices, and higher-dimensional objects.
I'm sure there are many others. I would like to emphasize that the list
is meant to be a list of *possibilities*.
--Jim