Re: Handling branch cuts for hypergeometric function s

>>>>> "Viktor" == Viktor T Toth  writes:

    Viktor> Ray, as I wrote in private e-mail, I think one issue is whether one

Sorry, I'm at work, and not at home, and I didn't see it on the
mailing list, so I assumed you wanted to keep it private.

    Viktor> views Maxima primarily as an interactive system vs. a
    Viktor> programming language.  The needs are different. But this
    Viktor> is where flags can be our friends; perhaps we should have
    Viktor> a consistent mechanism, controlled by some global flag(s),
    Viktor> to determine if these conditions should be handled with
    Viktor> interactive queries, implicit assumptions, or errors, and
    Viktor> then we could ensure that all packages behave in a
    Viktor> standard way.

But Lisp is both an interactive system and a programming language.
This distinction isn't made, and I think it works well.  If I make an
error at the prompt, I want my program that makes the same error to
behave the same way.

And I don't see how more global flags really solves anything.  It's
just more global flags, which maxima already has a lot of. :-(

Ray