On 5/7/06, Richard Fateman <fateman at eecs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> An alternative for this proposal is what Mathematica does
> for its operator, Head[].
> Head[a+b] is Plus.
> Head[3] is Integer
Hmm, that's an interesting idea. It's equivalent to considering
every atom x to be FOO(x) where FOO is the type of x.
I wouldn't mind considering this further but for now it's
beyond the scope of what I want here.
> You could also write a program which catches the error
> from op using errcatch, but I think you will still get an
> error message printed.
In general I don't like the assumption, which is pretty
thoroughly embedded in Maxima, that someone is
at the console.
Robert