hi volker, you wrote in part:
> My plans for the next future are to write a complete I/O and string
> processing for Maxima.
i mentioned in my previous message about numericalio for file i/o.
i forgot to ask, what are the string operations you want?
lisp provides some string operations.
i guess it would be straightforward to create a maxima function
for each lisp string function like this:
(defun $upcase (s) (l2m-string (string-upcase (m2l-string s))))
it turns out maxima strings are lisp symbols (not lisp strings).
so it seems necessary to convert back and forth.
(maxima strings are symbols because maclisp, the dialect in
which maxima was originally written, didn't have strings.
by chance or design, this is a useful feature, and i'm not concerned
at this time to argue for using lisp strings as maxima strings.)
for what it's worth,
robert dodier