On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 12:24 AM, Dan Gildea <gildea at cs.rochester.edu> wrote:
>> Obviously it is desirable to get correct results for discontinuous
>> functions. I'm not sure what is the best way to go about it.
>> It would be easy to wire in special cases for floor(x) and
>> ceiling(x), and that would help, but I don't know whether
>> Maxima can infer results for more complex cases from that.
>
> I think adding functions to handle floor/ceiling/round to the
> limit code wouldn't be too hard to do, and could handle almost
> all expressions that contain those functions. But right now
> maxima just gives up when it sees any of these three functions
> inside a limit.
The way to go imho (at least that's what we do in sympy) is to write a
gruntz algorithm, that only requires a series expansion and then
fix the series expansion of functions floor (et al.).
Ondrej