Hi
Robert Dodier wrote:
> On 5/23/07, Jussi Eloranta <Jussi.Eloranta at csun.edu> wrote:
>> Any other ways to do this?
>
> There is a Maxima function read to read and evaluate an expression
> from the console (and readonly to read it and not evaluate it).
OK, this is already useful (thanks to Andrej too for suggesting
readonly). The only remaining problem is that the line must be
terminated by ;
Well, this is kind of minor issue and I can instruct our students to
enter strings that way but still...
And, also this seems to be kind of basic service that should be
available. BTW, now that I just tried, entering
special characters kills readonly even though it is not supposed to
evaluate anything.
>
> There are low-level Lisp functions DBM-READ and SCAN-ONE-TOKEN-G
> (not sure about the names). I forget how these differ.
>
Unfortunately, I am lisp illiterate... (only C and Fortran)
>
> At this point I think we need to back up. Maybe you can remind us
> what your larger goal is here.
I am in process of rewriting a number of Mathematica scripts to work
under maxima. These scripts interact with users
asking all sorts of data. Some data is numerical and other is strings,
which might have special characters in them.
A simple example is asking for a filename. Since my students just use
these scripts for analyzing their laboratory experiments,
they are not familiar at all with Maxima and have no idea about the
significance of ; My goal is to be able to provide them
an environment that they can use at home and analyze experimental data
(btw physical chemistry). For most of them, installing
the program is already a major issue.
Jussi Eloranta
Cal State Northridge