On 3/29/09, R Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> While I agree that Maxima should not ask the sign of an expression when
> it can be figured out, the problem of ridding the system of these questions
> when the sign of an expression is NOT apparent cannot be solved by
> simply forbidding it, or blaming someone.
Are you sure? I'd like to blame the guy who wrote db.lisp.
What a disaster! It doesn't change anything but now I feel better.
> Probably the vast majority of users of Maxima are students, and they use
> the program for trivial tasks, like calculus homework.
I doubt it, actually. We don't seem to get many undergraduate calculus
questions.
> Since it appears that Sage is an inconvenient front-end to Maxima, the
> solution is simple. Don't use Sage to access Maxima. Maxima was
> designed as an interactive program.
The intent of the original developers doesn't matter so much anymore;
the present situation is that people want to use Maxima as a
noninteractive computational engine in various contexts.
Why not make it happen? It's not just Sage btw; coping with
asksign is a problem which has to be solved by every user interface.
> I know that Robert D. has expressed concern repeatedly about asksign,
Yeah. Just wanted to make sure everyone knows I haven't given up.
Robert Dodier