Especially for new readers of this list, you might not know about the
documentation for the commercial Macsyma system
which was mentioned in the previous note....
> Perhaps you would like to look at the commercial Macsyma manuals,
> which document a similar system.
> Look in docs/refman16.pdf for example.
>
> start at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/macsyma/
>
> There are also rather large documents for the frontend and graphics
> component of that system.
>
> These may not be especially good either, unfortunately.
What does this all mean?
1. The reference manual is almost 600 pages long. It describes things
that are about the same in Maxima, but also things that have been
changed or added by the commercial company. Why you might want to look
at it:
a. to see more description of something that works the same.
b. to be inspired by the design of some change to make a similar (or
different!) change to Maxima
c. to see how to add features missing in Maxima that were already
added to Macsyma.
d. to see what works or does not work in documentation. (Personally,
I think the Mathematica documentation is a better model to follow than
the Macsyma manual. WRI employed (probably still employs) professional
graphical designers.)
There are the other manuals that describe the graphical user interface
for Macsyma, which is quite flexible. It is mostly NOT written in Lisp.
I think that the Lisp underneath the commercial Macsyma is not as fancy
as the ones we are generally using, and this may be the reason the
front end was written in (C? C++?) .
There is also a tutorial, which I find disappointing because it spends
so much time on the front end, and could have been much better, I think.
Anyway, have fun.
RJF