On 5/24/07, Daniel Lakeland <dlakelan at street-artists.org> wrote:
> On Thu, May 24, 2007 at 09:01:10AM -0700, Jussi Eloranta wrote:
> > 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.
I'm in agreement on this point.
In the long run, the pain of attempting to wedge the existing
program into Maxima is likely greater than the pain of
rephrasing it to be more naturally Maxima-ish.
That said, these lisp functions might be useful.
DBM-READ -- read one Maxima expression, terminated by semicolon
SCAN-ONE-TOKEN -- read one Maxima token (no explicit terminator)
READ-LINE -- read text up to an end-of-line
To scan a string without quote marks and without a terminator,
probably you want READ-LINE. That is a built-in Lisp function.
HTH
Robert