Any feedback on windows installer for Maxima 5.9.0.9beta2?

On Fri, 2004-08-06 at 23:05, Milan Lukic wrote:
> As I participated in a discussion about plots recently, I was
> curious to see what examples James added to the description of help
> options. Most of those examples worked nicely, but a few did not. 

I appreciate your detailed comments. Most of these are things I would
not have noticed for various reasons. It is very helpful to get the
perspective of someone who is trying things for the first time.

>  1) plot2d([parametric,cos(t),sin(t),[t,-%pi/2,%pi/2]]);
>  Instead of a half-circle, the plot I got was two quadrilaterals
>  across each other. 
>  Note: Looking at the describe("plot2d") in Maxima 5.9.0, I see that
>  the corresponding example has the interval [-2*%pi,2*%pi]. Perhaps
>  I did not copy the thing correctly on the paper, but that should
>  not mater for what happened in the actual Maxima session earlier
>  today, since there I used copy/paste facility, did not type any of
>  the commands, this nor the other examples.

I can't exactly reproduce the behavior you report. I do see, however,
that the parametric plot needs more points. I updated the number of plot
points used (nticks) in the parametric examples.

>  2) An example that was supposed to produce plots of several trig
>  functions and send the output into the file trig.eps: Maxima
>  performed the task without a complaint, but the resulting trig.eps
>  file was empty!

There is a general problem with the examples: they will fail if the
strings in "" to be set to gnuplot have line breaks in them. I have
updated the documentation to remove the spurious line breaks.

>  3) The example of plot3d(atan(-x^2+y^3/4 ... ) with quite a few
>  options including "unset surface", "unset key" ...: The plot window
>  never came up, and I could not find any output file either. The
>  example before that one (of plotting the same atan(-x^2+y^3/4)
>  function) worked fine.

Same explanation as the previous problem.

>  4) I think that something like case 3) happened in the case of
>  plot3d(cos(-x^2+y^3/4) ...) and also in the case of the Real Part
>  of z^(1/3).
>  
>  5) The example:
>      M:matrix([1,2,34],[1,2,3,2],[1,2,3,4],[1,2,3,3])$
> 		 f(x,y):=float(M[?round(x),?round(y)]);
> 		 plot3d(f,[x,1,4],[y,1,4],[grid,4,4]);
> 		 
> 		 ended with "Maxima encountered a Lisp error" message.

You must have made a mistake with copying and pasting here. There should
be a comma between the first 3 and 4 in the first line. When I copy and
paste out of the documentation, the example works.

>   6) The example about 
> 	   pointsl:?draw2d(1/x,[.05,10],.03)
> 		     (not sure if I copied this correctly)
>      also ended with a "Maxima encountered a Lisp error" message.

I'm not even sure what is supposed to happen here. The example obviously
won't work. I have removed it from the documentation.

Thanks,
Jim