"sum" quotes its arguments -- what's up with that?
Subject: "sum" quotes its arguments -- what's up with that?
From: C Y
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 10:19:58 -0800 (PST)
--- Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I think that many of the problems, with integrate, sum etc.
> would disappear if one insisted
> on a notation that was better.
>
> For example, borrowing from lisp or scheme...
>
> instead of sum(i,i,1,3)
>
> we could have
> sum ( lambda([i],i), 1..3).
>
> Thus it is clear where i is bound.
Except then we will have a lot of new users who won't be able to
understand why they have to type lambda while doing a summation.
I think rather than trying to come up with a notational workaround we
should put on our radar screen the sorting out of scope issues in
Maxima. That seems like a perfect issue to tackle in 5.9.3
development, since it will (hopefully) kill a lot of the reported bugs
and unexpected behavior in things like this.
CY
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