log10, was: bug report, or am I doing something wrong?

"You would presumably want log10(a*b) to simplify to
log10(a)+log10(b), etc., which would mean duplicating the log
simplifier.  You would want logcontract, integrate, limit, realpart,
etc. to operate on log10.  You would want comparison to know that
log10(x)<log(x) when x>1, etc. etc."

" yeah. well, it could happen with sufficient effort, but i'm not
willing to invest the weeks or months necessary, so it won't happen any
year soon ..."

Point taken.

Thank you anyway
LS.

-----Original Message-----
From: Stavros Macrakis [mailto:macrakis at gmail.com] 
Sent: 13 February 2006 14:59
To: Robert Dodier
Cc: Luke Sharkey; maxima at math.utexas.edu
Subject: Re: [Maxima] log10, was: bug report, or am I doing something
wrong?

> actually, i'm in favor of this, although i would call it log10.
> the difficulty with log10(x) := log(x)/log(10); is that log10
> goes away as soon as it is entered (and in its place, log appears).
> what i want to see is log10 acting as a distinct function,
> which doesn't simplify to log automatically.


Reducing things to quasi-canonical form is one of the ways Maxima
works; having more than one representation for the same or very
similar things (e.g. x! vs. gamma(x+1)) tends to cause complications.
Maxima does support some simple extensions for arbitrary functions
(notably grad), but once you get beyond those, you essentially have to
build a whole infrastructure from scratch, and modify functions all
over the system.

             -s

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