On 6/18/06, Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> It seems you are proposing to change the language
> for floats to require an explicit decimal point. This is
> one option, but not my favorite. I don't care for the
> backslash-- it is too easy to forget, and it doesn't
> always lead to an error message.
> Also it is not backward compatible.
Explicit disambiguation on the part of the user is a hassle,
but it's needed only when ibase makes some inputs
ambiguous. If I set ibase so that a through z look like
digits, I'll have to write \load, \print, 1.0e0, etc, but
that's a problem of my own creation; Maxima is just
doing its best to follow instructions.
Maxima inherits symbol/number ambiguity from Lisp,
where it doesn't appear to have caused any damage.
E.g. (setq *read-base* 36) '(now is the time for all good men)
=> (30704 676 38210 1377158 20331 13737 778477 29039)
> This is not an important issue if the program works OK as
> long as ibase is set to some normal value.
This is a key point. The proposed revision of ascii-numberp
changes the interpretation of some input tokens only if ibase != 10.
Robert Dodier