On 6/7/07, Daniel Lakeland <dlakelan at street-artists.org> wrote:
> For the group: have we fixed or improved find_root with respect to its
> first argument since my version of maxima (at work)??? (5.10.0)
No, the evaluation (or lack thereof) hasn't been changed.
But let's take the opportunity to work on it now.
Here's a proposal. (1) Make $FIND_ROOT a DEFUN.
(It is now a DEFMSPEC which has its own evaluation
policy.) (2) If find_root encounters a non-numeric value,
have it return a partially-evaluated find_root expression
instead of barfing out an error message.
I'm guessing the current evaluation scheme stems from a
desire to get stuff like plot2d(find_root(foo(x, a), x, ...), [a, ...])
to work. (I.e. find_root is embedded in a call to some other
function.) I think that's a worthy goal; but I hope we can
achieve that with less pain via (1) and (2) above.
Comments?
Robert Dodier