proposal for option to suppress input and output labels

(I've been away from email, so this is my first posting in a while..)

Someone using maxima as a non-interactive program could call programs which
produce answers (functionally or by setting global values). If you want to
use (say) the maxima "solve" facility, then setting up a call to the lisp
function $solve, or something similar, may far better than trying to extract
information from a text file or stream resulting from running the maxima
top-level.

There are some programs (e.g. asksign) which should understand whether there
is a person or surrogate able to answer displayed questions, and not ask
questions from a non-existent person. What could be done is perhaps an error
message such as "computation cannot continue without knowing if XXX> YYY".
Which is, I think, saying what the program calling asksign is saying...

RJF


> -----Original Message-----
> From: maxima-bounces at math.utexas.edu [mailto:maxima-
> bounces at math.utexas.edu] On Behalf Of Robert Dodier
> Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2007 7:31 AM
> To: maxima list
> Subject: 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
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