On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 2:38 AM, van Nek <van.nek at arcor.de> wrote:
> It seems that I must read the doc about ev. Doesn't ev rip off the first
> quote?
>
Ev tries to "do what you mean", which in practice means that it is very hard
to predict what it will actually do without actually following the detailed
logic. In particular, it has a funny "substitute symbols with values" step.
So I don't recommend using ev(...) or ...,... (syntax for the same thing)
for exploration of Maxima semantics. block([listarith:true],...) has much
cleaner semantics than ev(..., listarith:true).
In fact, I discourage the use of ev in general. (In particular, it should
never be used in functions you define -- at least in interactive use you
eyeball the results as you get them.)
-s