Daniel Lakeland <dlakelan at street-artists.org> writes:
...
> Agreed. Furthermore if I enter 1.4 I EXPECT it to be converted to a
> IEEE float.
As do many people.
However, when a beginner (and I have heard suggestions of using Maxima
in, say, Calc courses) types something in, they probably (not
unreasonably) expect Maxima to work with the data they enter. It does
not. Unless people feel that Maxima should only be used by experts,
this isn't something that should be shrugged off or delegated to a
footnote. It should be emphasized early. I just glanced through the
first few pages of the manual, and I didn't come across anything along
the lines of "Maxima may convert some numbers you type in to other
numbers", and it should be there.
> Perhaps what we need to contemplate is a set of "modes". For example
> the maxima startup could say:
>
> Welcome to maxima: Maxima is capable of many types of computations. To
> help select default settings type "askdefaultmodes();"
That's a pretty good idea.
Jay