general comments, was: proposal to cut some aliases

Richard,

> Maybe there should be a command-completion facility,

OK, this much is possible at present -- Maxima ships
(since 5.9.3) with a script rmaxima which executes
command-line Maxima within rlwrap (readline wrapper),
and rlwrap is told to use a list of Maxima symbol names
for word completion.

> 1. Changing the documentation to reflect what is really there.

There has been a lot of this.

> 2. Changing the code to agree with the documentation.

There has been a little of this.

> 3. Removing BOTH code and documentation  (and
> replacing with something better.)

Well, this is presumably what motivates people to start
new projects ....

> It is certainly possible for someone to decide to write an
> entirely new document which describes a CAS that is
> NOT a mess, and to use as much code as is convenient,
> from any source whatsoever, including Maxima, to implement
> that CAS. I have, occasionally, thought about doing this.
> Should that new CAS be called Maxima? Maybe not.

Someone could do that, but it won't be me. Maxima has
all the generalities right from my point of view. I think
it's fair to say the stuff I want to do is a refinement of
stuff that already exists in Maxima.

> But I suspect most people, including me, look at Maxima's
> future as one of (mostly) adding (un-controversial) features or
> efficiency. This could, I suppose, include building yet another
> front end or even evaluator/simplifier, with different rules.

Within the existing framework, aside from bug fixes,
I'd like most to see a stronger declare/assume system.
Oh, and a package system would be nice.
I wouldn't mind it if someone would rework the simplifier
to be entirely rules-based, or if someone implemented
lexical scope. I see all of this stuff as incremental improvements.

I'd also like to continue cleaning up the cruft has that
accumulated over the decades. I'll make more noise
about this after the next release.

All the best,
Robert Dodier