On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 7:42 PM, Richard Fateman
<fateman at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I think that an annoying aspect has been that (3+4*%i)^2, numer doesn't do what you probably want; compare with rectform(%);
That's yet another bad case. Not even float((3+4*%i)^2) gives you
-7.0+24.0*%i. 3+4*%i is only recognized as a number in few contexts in
Maxima.
Interestingly, the special case %e^(2+4*%i),numer *is* handled today,
but (2+4*%i)^2,numer is not.
> I would like to take the special check for $%pi out of the main program of
> the simplifier, the program simplifya...
Not sure what you mean here. I assume you want sin(%pi/7),numer to
give a numerical result? Currently, that happens because of the
special check for %pi. The alternative would be, I suppose, for sin
(and other functions which can take a float arg to a float result) to
test its argument for being an explicit numerical constant (this is a
different test from constantp or numberp), and in that case force it
to float.
-s