Intelligent result checking before asking positive/negative/zero...?

edA-qa mort-ora-y wrote:

> Is there anyway to tell Maxima to try all possibilities and give all 
> answers rather than asking questions such as "is x positive negative or 
> zero?"?
There is no simple way to do this.
You can try to anticipate all such questions and use "assume" to
try all combinations, in turn.
> 
> That is, firstly, can I instruct maxima to produce a table showing all 
> the results for each option, but secondly, and more importantly, in many 
> occassions it doesn't actually matter what the answer is (that is, the 
> final result is the same regardless of whether I say positive negative 
> or zero).  In this second case it would be nice if Maxima just didn't 
> ask at all, since it actually doesn't make any difference.
I agree that it would be nice, but this requires some level of introspection
that is generally difficult to put into a program like Maxima. Some
specific examples could probably be handled by (say) better
integration programs.


RJF


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