problem with sbcl when it thinks it's not interactive

About results which depend on unspecified parameters,
this topic comes up from time to time, specifically
because people want to use Maxima as a noninteractive
programming environment. I believe searching at
http://maxima.sf.net/maximalist.html
for "noninteractive" and/or "asksign" should find something.

> 2. Return an unevaluated 'if
> This opens a *huge* can of worms

I'm a lot more optimistic about this approach, since
I've already made some progress on it, and aside from
tickling various bugs, it is not difficult.

It has been claimed that returning if ... then ... isn't a
good idea because computing some alternatives can
take a long time. Well, so what? There's no guarantee
that the alternative that I "really want" is the one which
is easy to compute.

All the best,
Robert Dodier