Correcting priority issues in mactex.lisp

Richard Fateman wrote:
> The alternatives seem to be
> (a) reach a consensus.  Sometimes this is possible because only one
> person, the one making the change, is the only one with an opinion,
> and everyone else goes along with it.
> (b) fork the project.
> (c) add a flag.
> (d) reject the change.
> (e) impose the change without a consensus. [e.g. just insert a "bug
> fix" even if it is wrong]
> (f) do what Mathematica does and have TraditionalForm, InputForm,
> FullForm, TeXForm  functions.  (there may be more..)
> (g) fork mactex for imaxima.
>
> anything else?
(h) Keep things as they are, but provide a way for users to customize
tex output.  Unfortunately, I have no good ideas on what the
customizations would be and how they could be specified.

(i) Or maybe we should stop pretending that the tex output is
appropriate for anything other than a simple tex form that you are
expected to hand edit if you actually care about how it looks.

At least that's what I've had to do the few times I wanted to have
Maxima output in a document.  (But that was long ago.)  There's no way
for maxima to know I want different kinds of parentheses or I need the
parentheses to emphasize some grouping.  Maybe I want fractions on
several lines or all scrunched together on one line.  Or different
styles on the same line.  Or ....

>
>
> in wxmaxima, try
> 'sum(b[n]+a[n],n,1,k)+a[n]$
>
Even in a plain text terminal, the above form as a 2-D display confuses
me.  A worse case is sum(b[n],n,1,k)+a[n].  But I've kind of learned
that the summation adds parentheses if needed.  But I've seen math books
do similar things to emphasize the grouping of stuff in the summand, but
I've also seen it done as above.  Without context, it's impossible to
figure out how far the summation sign really goes.  I even get confused
when people write 1/ab where sometimes that means 1/(a*b) and sometimes
means 1/a/b.  I have one article that has sqrt((a+b)(c+d)) that uses the
radical sign, but no overbar, so it's impossible for me to figure out if
the author meant sqrt((a+b)*(c+d)) or sqrt(a+b)*(c+d).  (I had to derive
it myself to figure out the right answer.)

The ambiguities are just endless.

Ray