some editing tools for maxima /Grumpy old man..

On Thu, Dec 07, 2006 at 07:57:06AM -0800, Richard Fateman wrote:
> I have thought about responding earlier to a bunch of issues, but held my
> tongue, thinking I was just revealing myself as old fashioned. But I decided
> to say it anyway, and let people react .  I was prompted by this last note.

> Here's my gripe. It seems to me that any of these features that are already
> in lisp should be used in their lisp form.  Defsystem (or similar) in lisp
> instead of Make.  Lisp instead of Perl.  

> The "history" feature below can be done by looking at data in the LISP
> program. (As indicated, $playback shows how., as someone else mentioned..)
> So that is really a better solution, at least at first glance.
> RJF

You won't get a complaint from me in terms of preferring the use of
lisp for implementing new features. Even for replacing some things
we're currently doing in Makefiles, and Perl, but I wonder what it is
about this particular case that snapped you? :-)

Emacs is in my view the logical way to handle interactive
highly-textual computations. The ability to navigate a buffer and copy
and paste code and results, as well as to retrieve input history
highlight syntax, and soforth makes it the logical choice. It comes
with both an enormous set of features and familiarity to many.

wxMaxima seems to have its own set of nice features, which includes
input history but also a set of interactive menus that make
discovering the most common maxima commands easier for a new user.

Certainly, if you are planning to write a program that manipulates
maximas history you should do it in lisp. but why reinvent emacs or
wxMaxima for interactive use when they're already available?

Perhaps I read the original post wrong, but it didn't seem to me to be
about recalling what maxima knew about the input history, more like
recalling some input textually and then editing it into a modified
form.

-- 
Daniel Lakeland
dlakelan at street-artists.org
http://www.street-artists.org/~dlakelan