Representing the case "no result"



On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Dieter Kaiser <drdieterkaiser at web.de> wrote:

> > Actually what's so special about lists? They are just ((mlist simp) ...).
> > You can very well introduce something like
> > ((mnan simp) divergent gensym offending_expression).
>
> It is special to the empty list, that it is the standard behavior of
> Maxima to simplify an empty list in arithmetic expressions to an empty
> list. The empty list is not simplified away. Therefore arithmetic
> expressions do not change the result "NO SOLUTION".
>

I think I may have missed the beginning of this thread, so I may be talking
about a different issue, but....

Isn't the problem with empty lists that scalar OP [] => [], e.g. inf * [] =>
[], []^inf => [], etc.

           -s