Subject: Discussion about arrays and matrices in Maxima
From: Barton Willis
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 06:54:32 -0500
(1) Some of the code in the linearalgebra package converts Maxima
matrices to CL arrays and back. The linearalgebra package doesn't use
CLOS, but maybe it should (see mring.lisp); the recently contributed
numeric.lisp uses CLOS.
(2) The Maxima translator (plus mode_declare statements) allows Maxima
code to directly use IEEE arithmetic without going through the
services of the Maxima simplifier.
(3) Converting Maxima matrices to arrays is a huge change. Maxima
might need to be patched in 100s of places. It could take years to
find and correct all the bugs that result from this change. The
coverage in the test suite is uneven--don't count on it picking up all
such bugs.
Barton