On 7/20/07, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> Maxima tends to the cryptic, which is perhaps reasonable for the most
> common operations (diff, rat) but probably not for the less common
> ones (cf, ilt, genfact).
I'm not opposed to commonly-used functions having short, cryptic names.
This is something like Hamming codes, right? To minimize the total
amount of typing, the most commonly used functions should have short names.
> Still, once you start becoming a heavy user of
> rational_to_continued_fraction or inverse_laplace_transform or
> generalized_factorial or even factor_polynomial, that quickly becomes
> annoying. Maxima does have the "alias" function which allows defining
> alternate names.
I think alias has too much potential to cause pain & suffering to be
used to make abbreviations.
A package system could be a means of optional disambiguation.
e.g. (with putative syntax)
transforms at laplace => Laplace transform.
import (transforms at laplace); => now you needn't type the
transforms@ on the front end, just "laplace" will do.
I concede that packages wouldn't be able to handle some or many
interesting cases.
FWIW
Robert