On Thu, May 24, 2007 at 01:02:24PM -0700, Jussi Eloranta wrote:
> Daniel Lakeland wrote:
> >
> > You could have the students simply enter something like:
> >
> > (%i0) crunch_results("file name",trials,"chemical name", molarmass);
> >
> >
>
> Well, most of them have hard time even understanding what directories
> are and how you specify paths (without file selector dialogs).
> Just plain command line is not going to work in practice (or it would if
> allocate 100% of my time for helping them out - I have to do research
> too..).
I understand this concern. But I encourage you to consider whether the
script you are writing will actually be easier.
> Anyway, I could just use maxima (since readline works fine there) but
> then, for example, how would one print out graphs? In plain maxima,
> plot2d et al. pop up a gnuplot window and it is not possible print
> anything from there. I could ask them to generate postscript (or
> whatever printer type they might have) but this is again getting to be
> too complicated. For this reason, I would prefer using wxmaxima because
> it is easy to print graphs (& output) from there but the readline issue
> still persists.
You can send graphs directly to a postscript file in your maxima
code. And then you can open a postscript viewer, and they can print
from there. At least, this is possible on Unix/Linux I don't know how
to do it in windows.
--
Daniel Lakeland
dlakelan at street-artists.org
http://www.street-artists.org/~dlakelan