On 12/13/07, Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> How can one introduce intervals into Maxima/Macsyma in a sensible way?
Aside from implementation issues, there is the question of how to
represent intervals. At this point I think I;'m in favor of "set builder"
notation like { x | x < 5 and x > -2 } (or with "s.t." instead of "|" or
whatever). That covers the special cases (open vs closed vs half-open)
and generalizations (complement, union, Cartesian product of
intervals, spheres, arbitrary predicates) without needing any
additional notations.
I've written stuff like open_interval(a, b) in discussions recently but
set-builder notation is much more powerful, and not really too much
harder to work with in an implementation.
FWIW
Robert