I also need this list since Maxima is really complex software. Regarding the algexact flag; it reminds me of the old joke. The
patient said to the doctor, "It hurts when I do this", and me, the doctor said "don't do that".
Regarding realonly, I never would have picked that up. freeof(%i, expr) does not mean expr is real. This realonly flag is very
misleading, it should probably not be called realonly, since it's setting has nothing to do with that.
Rich
----- Original Message -----
From: "Barton Willis" <willisb at unk.edu>
To: <rvh2007 at comcast.net>
Cc: <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu>; <maxima at math.utexas.edu>
Sent: Saturday, December 20, 2008 12:10 PM
Subject: Re: [Maxima] pw.mac version 2.3.1
Sure, if realonly worked perfectly, your program would work correctly
for cubic arguments to signum functions. Thinking that realonly is
perfect is a reasonable assumption (how hard can that be?)---the user
documentation hedges:
When `realonly' is `true', `algsys' returns only those solutions which
are free of `%i'.
That is 100% true (I think) and 100% misleading. Reading that for the
first time (or second or third...), I'd assume that realonly would
expunge all nonreal solutions. But it doesn't.
Maxima programming is more interesting than pure numerical
programming; I regularly learn new things and rely on help and advice
from this list. And I've been doing this for awhile.
Barton