On Thu, May 24, 2007 at 09:01:10AM -0700, Jussi Eloranta wrote:
> >
> > 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.
...
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.
Maxima is an interactive system already. I agree that students will be
unfamiliar with how to use it, and this is a reason to try to make
their interaction as simple as possible. However, perhaps you should
consider modifying your system so that you provide a set of functions
that do the computations, but let the students enter in maxima
commands to invoke the computations.
So rather than have a script that they interact with in the following
way:
enter file name
enter number of trials
enter name of chemical
enter molar mass
....crunch crunch crunch...
Print results...
You could have the students simply enter something like:
(%i0) crunch_results("file name",trials,"chemical name", molarmass);
A one page cheat sheet could be used to document the available
"crunchers".
There are several advantages to this idea, including that they
gradually learn more about maxima, but also including that you need
not debug a script that performs the interactions, and the students
can take advantage of command line recall and editing for repeated
computations.
--
Daniel Lakeland
dlakelan at street-artists.org
http://www.street-artists.org/~dlakelan