Subject: Strange thing in Maxima: reduction of fraction
From: Jay Belanger
Date: Fri, 08 Dec 2006 09:38:12 -0600
"Stavros Macrakis" <macrakis at alum.mit.edu> writes:
>> (%i3) a/a;
>> (%o3) 1
>> this seems to me true only if a is not zero.
>
> You are right. There are several ways Maxima could handle this:
...
> 2) don't simplify at all in cases like this (very inconvenient)
Emacs Calc has the notion of safe and unsafe simplifications. It
will by default only do safe simplifications, but can be told to do
unsafe simplifications on a single expression or a global variable can
be set saying to always do unsafe simplifications when simplifying.
This seems to me to be a reasonable approach. (That being said, Calc
will cheerfully simplify a/a to 1.)
Jay