general comments, was: proposal to cut some aliases

> I wouldn't mind it if someone would rework the simplifier
> to be entirely rules-based,


The core simplifier is fast and (pretty) good because thought was put into
(1) standardizing the internal format (sorting arguments in useful ways) and
taking advantage of that and (2) ordering the rule applications.  No doubt
this work could be reproduced by a combination of compiling rules cleverly
and giving hints of various kinds, but I suspect the result would be slower,
no more functional, and perhaps still difficult to extend (presumably the
main motivation for doing it). As I understand it, this is pretty much what
happened when Wolfram tried to do it in SMP.  (But I've only heard this
second-hand.)

So my tendency would be to avoid dealing with the core +/*/^ simplifier and
to concentrate on the other parts.

I'd also like to continue cleaning up the cruft has that
> accumulated over the decades.


Actually, I'm pretty sure that most bugs (except for xmaxima and plotting
stuff) date back to the first decade of Macsyma's existence, not to the
three decades since then.

           -s