Hello Lorenzo,
> 1)In case I need to run a batch file, is there any
> special difference wrt to using it under Linux?
> I have the same question when it comes to loading the
> numericalio package.
Theoretically a batch file should work the same in
Linux and Windows. Any differences are bugs.
> 3)Robert Dodier kindly told me how to read
> sequentially a set of files {filename1...filenameN},
> but what happens when each file has a final extension?
Should work the same whatever the form of the file name,
so long as filenames are specified as quoted strings, e.g.,
"foo.1", "foo.2", "foo.3", ....
> 4)I need to write a Maxima script which can be used by
> non-tech people (not that I am any experienced
> developer myself).
> Because I am not 100% sure they will let me install
> any software on their machines, it would be even
> better, if possible, to create an executable they can
> run with a double click and then do what they like
> with the result files.
Various Lisp versions allow one to load a program
and then dump out an image which contains
everything needed to run the program.
I don't know the details about that.
> 5)Is it any difficult to use Maxima to read a data
> table like in R with the read.table command?
maxima/share/contrib/numericalio/numericalio.lisp
contains functions to read from a file into a matrix,
list, array, or hash table. There is no function which
replicates read.table, but you can get something like it,
depending on the format of the data file.
data only => read_matrix recommended
(other functions read_list, read_nested_list, etc work too)
data + column labels => M: read_matrix followed by
labels: M [1]; to get labels and M2: submatrix (1, M); to get data
(nota bene M and M2 share rows -- modification to one
modifies the other; M2: copymatrix (submatrix (1, M));
if that's a problem)
data + column labels + row labels => read_hashed_array ("foo.bar", T);
followed by T [baz]; where baz is the first row label,
to get colum labels, and arrayinfo (T); to get the row labels
(arrayinfo returns some other stuff as well)
T [quux] is the row labeled by quux (labels can be symbols or numbers)
listarray (T); displays all rows
R's read.table inspects the file to try to figure out how to read it,
and then stores the data and metadata in an object called a data frame;
probably it would be useful to emulate that in Maxima.
hope this helps,
Robert Dodier