proposal for option to suppress input and output labels

Hello,

Recently on maxima-lang-fr someone wanted to run Maxima in a
noninteractive mode to generate some stuff for further processing
by another program. Toward this end he wanted a way to suppress
the input and output labels. I'm pretty sure that would be useful to others.

I propose that we invent a new command line option --very-quiet
which suppresses input and output labels (and the banner message).
Here is a possible implementation:
http://maxima.sourceforge.net/misc/very-quiet.diff

Ideally there would be a --noninteractive flag which would somehow
disable asksign, in addition to suppressing the labels & banner.

I wonder if --very-quiet or the would-be --noninteractive should also
suppress echoing the input expressions, and just print the output,
and maybe also print everything in 1-dimensional form.

Comments?

best,
Robert

PS. An example:

$ cat << EOF > /tmp/1.in
> a : 1;
> b : x;
> c : sin(u);
> (a + b + c)^2;
> expand (%);
> EOF
$ cat /tmp/1.in | sh maxima-local --very-quiet
                                1
                                x
                             sin(u)
                                        2
                        (x + sin(u) + 1)
          2                         2
         x  + 2 sin(u) x + 2 x + sin (u) + 2 sin(u) + 1