On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 12:20 AM, John Lapeyre <pdl at johnlapeyre.com> wrote:
> 1) A question: what does (meval* expr) correspond to in maxima?
Evaluation on the command line.
2) I tried Robert's suggestion of using a macro function
> (::=) (that looks like a frightening emoticon) I made
> progress this wasy with the list-making Table function, but
> it fixed some examples and broke some others.
>
Well, ::= has a quite different function from :=. ::= defines a macro, that
is, it rewrites the input expression, which is then re-evaluated.
> 2a) The lisp Table implementation is the same speed when
> compiled as create_list. It is interesting that makelist is
> about 10 times slower. makelist should probably be rewritten
>
It sounds like that would be a good idea.
> 2b) Table is really a different animal than create_list, maybe
> complementary: create_list uses multiple iterators to build
> a serial list, while Table uses them to build a nested list
> of arbitrary depth. It is heavily used in Mma code. At some
> point, it might be useful to include it in the Maxima
> distribution, either as it is or modified. But I can't see a
> natural way to merge it with an existing function.
>
Could you post a specification of Table?
-s