It does not seem to be clear, if all versions of Maxima exhibit this behavior. For the experts, here is the build_info() of my version.
Maxima version: 5.15.0
Maxima build date: 17:36 4/20/2008
host type: i686-pc-mingw32
lisp-implementation-type: GNU Common Lisp (GCL)
lisp-implementation-version: GCL 2.6.8
This is a Windows build of Maxima I got from the Maxima homepage. Maybe they changed something for Windows.
I have solved the problem for now by scanning the input string and sending all commands one by one. As far as I see, this seems to work.
I should mention, that Maxima might consider introducing an external program mode, which would give more information to the programs. Currently I do
- Filter off the (%o...) stuff, since it is not useful for my interface
- Filter off the (%i...) prompt, since I do not need that either
- wait for Maxima to deliver the prompt after each call, where I continue my program. I recognize the prompt by a special prompt string I set in Maxima.
- Handle the questions myself. They send the prompt string, thank god!
- Abort the questions by sending faulty stuff to Maxima, when I need to do automatic execution.
- Abort Maxima completely and restart, when the computation takes too long and the user does not want to wait.
I plan to do the same with Linux. However, it will be difficult, since I have problems with Linux on my hardware (Dell D630 notebook with nvidia card). Moreover, Euler for Linux is programmed in Qt and I do not have much experience with that.
Yours
Rene Grothmann