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

I'm leaning towards Robert's arguments here...for non-technical reasons.
We want young people to find maxima useful for their problems, so that
they learn it early and move towards open source tools.  

The biggest obstacle I face in using open source in my research is
opposition from those who use other tools.  They often make this choice
due to some obscure or trivial difference (like log10).  Choices made
early in life often become the default later (that is why marking people
target the young, even though they don't have much $$$)

This addition would not be detrimental to the "professional" users,
since we would never use it on our "real" problems.  (Although I think
there is some bias baked into those terms.)

Pete



On Wed, 2006-02-15 at 08:29 -0700, Robert Dodier wrote:
> hello stavros,
> 
> > I think we all agree that it's not a big deal to add it.  The question
> > is whether it is a good idea to add it *incompletely*.
> 
> completely enough for computational problems, is what i'm proposing.
> 
> > > since log10 is typically used for calculations only,
> > > i don't see any need to reproduce all of the algebraic
> > > machinery already in place for log base e.
> >
> > Then why add it at all?
> 
> the motivating desideratum is to express problems and
> their solutions in the language customary in the problem
> domain.
> 
> log10 is a function which appears in problems in some
> nontrivial domains (high school math, engineering, maybe others).
> 
> > So you would find it acceptable that log10(x)/log(x) not simplify?
> 
> yes.
> 
> best,
> robert
> 
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