I am putting together a collection of Maxima functions that
behave like Mathematica functions. Here is a question.
How should the functions be named ?
I have about thirty functions (and a bunch of regression
tests) and I want to rename them as few times as
possible. It seems pretty clear to me now that using exactly
the same name as Mathematica is best. Because
* its easy to remember the naming convention.
* Since Mma names all begin with capital letters, there
would be no collisions.
But maybe there are other arguments. Here are some other choices
* Lowercase Mma names
IntegerDigits --> integerdigits
However, some names would collide with existing Maxima names.
eg:
Mma Maxima
-------------------
Riffle join
Join append
Append cons
Union (lists) union (sets)
(btw: In the first three cases, the Mma names are better than Maxima)
So another choice is
* lowercase Mma name and prepend 'm'
Append --> mappend
or m_append
This should probably be done uniformly so that
IntegerDigits --> mintegerdigits.
Thanks,
John