As a general rule, it is probably a mistake to
say
"I don't know what this does, so I'll take it out of Maxima".
It would be supportive of a change if you could say
"The commercial Macsyma made this change". Then
at least the 20 years or so of development of Symbolics
and Macsyma Inc came to the same conclusion.
In this case lognumer is still in Macsyma. It is
set to false by default, and thus does no harm, except
to make some programs clumsy, I gather.
I suspect that lognumer somehow comes from the needs of calculus
students who haven't learned about complex numbers and
use Macsyma for their homework.
RJF
Robert Dodier wrote:
> On 12/1/05, Barton Willis wrote:
>
>>I would like to modify log so that it uses the CL log function
>>for complex double float arguments. Doing this isn't difficult,
>>but I don't know what to do with things like log(1.2 + %i*5.6)
>>when 'lognumer' is true. If you don't know, lognumer makes
>>log *sometimes* behave as log composed with abs.
>
>
> maybe we can just cut out lognumer.
> it makes a mess, and i'm not seeing the usefulness of it.
>
> robert
>
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