Correcting priority issues in mactex.lisp


On Tue, 26 May 2009, Richard Fateman wrote:

 
< If you can, look at the Mathematica discussion of the variants on 
< display. They concede that traditional mathematical notation is 
< ambiguous and you should not use it if there are issues like this.
< 
< If we start putting in extra parentheses each time someone claims to be 
< confused, it may not end here.
< 
< Time for a flag?  Perhaps something like add_extra_parens:   all    or 
< some    or none {situation now}.

I favour this. There is a real trade-off between ambiguity and
intelligibility. A correctly parenthesised expression may be completely
unintelligible (or so costly for the user to decipher, as to appear
unintelligible). I would prefer to be able to choose the level of
syntactic rigour of maxima's output because the optimal trade-off
depends on the user.

Robert Dodier wrote:
< > Those complaining about this change should note that, in fact,
< > the 2-d display already makes such parentheses, and it has for
< > a long time (at least since 5.9.2).

A note on terminology: comments on the change were invited. Not to be prickly, but 
I commented, I raised an objection even, but I did not complain.

I don't use 2-d display unless I have problems deciphering 1-d output,
so I had not noticed that 2-d display does use such parantheses.
However, I do use tex() quite a bit, and it does not use such
parentheses at the moment.

(Here is a second reason why a flag would be desirable: I use tex() to
produce latex code for use in latex documents intended to be read by
other mathematicians. This latex code has an intended audience that is
considerably different from those reading imaxima output. I don't think
one solution fits all...)

Leo 

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