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

> > 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 such functionality today.

In principle, it could be built rather straightforwardly.  You would
intercept all user questions, record them, and give one of the
answers.  Then, when the calculation was finished, you would repeat it
with each different combination of answers (and possibly new ones). 
You would then combine the answers.

To make this useful, you'd want to analyze the questions
intelligently, and combine the results intelligently.  You'd also want
to handle errors reasonably.  The result would be represented as some
sort of conditional expression, e.g.

      integrate(x^a,x,0,1) => 'if a>-1 then 1/(a+1) else 'und

If you work through this example, you realize that things are rather
messy.  Maxima has bugs in integral assumption handling (documented in
the bug list) where assumptions persist after an error.  There are
lots too many questions.  And of course Maxima doesn't actually
support conditional expressions in any useful way.

But it could be a fun project to clean all this up and make it work.

        -s