Hello all, a few random comments on Cliff's recent message.
Many thanks to Cliff for his work on this topic.
> Hmm. OK. I take it there isn't a convenient list of lisp level
> funcitions that have been "Maximaized"?. That should probably be its
> own section in the Programming chapter.
Agreed that such a list would be very useful. Cliff, maybe
you want to file a bug report and assign it the "documentation"
category so that this item isn't forgotten?
> Actually, we decided to deliberately make the finalevallist a
> non-maxima list in order to provide for the possibility of
> preventing the user from assigning stupid stuff to the list.
Um, I have to say I'm not in favor of this -- preventing
stupidity by the user often has the side effect of preventing
cleverness as well... If nothing else, making this list a
Lisp list instead of a Maxima list means it cannot be
conveniently inspected. If we're going to provide this
feature, I just don't see a motivation for making it
more cumbersome than necessary.
About the name --
> Perhaps lastsimp would be better?
How about tellsimplast ? Then it is in a group (conceptually)
with tellsimp and tellsimpafter. The corresponding front-end
simplification function would be tellsimpfirst, I guess.
> It [tellsimpafter] seems to insist on looking at
> subexpressions, which for certain unit situations
> doesn't work at all.
>From studying some tellsimpafter examples, it appears
that tellsimpafter works bottom up, so it starts with
subexpressions and ends with the entire expression.
Perhaps this sheds some light on simplifying top-down --
is there a way to determine if some expression is a
subexpression? (Unlikely, I suppose.) Or maybe we can
consider changing bottom-up to top-down?
Cliff, maybe you can clarify which kinds of units
simplifications seem problematic. I naively suppose that
if there is a canonical simplification, it wouldn't matter
if some detour were made on the way up the expression tree
-- eventually the whole expression is reached. But
apparently that doesn't describe what's happening here.
Can you fill us in?
All the best,
Robert Dodier
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