On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 9:51 AM, Leo Butler<l.butler at ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> I think that maxima is inconsistent in these regards.
Well, the question is whether such inconsistency is a bug or a feature;
I think we ought to press for greater consistency.
> You can see that the the assignment operator ':' does some type-checking,
> but it is inconsistent. It was the first 2 examples that prompted my
> original question. Also, when I looked at 'mset' in src/mlisp.lisp, I
> could see that there is some type-checking (notably, for 'sysconst').
>
> I have since realised that the online documentation for define_variable
> explains how to force type-checking, so that one can hack a 'const'
> class, for example.
Chances are good that nobody has looked at this carefully for decades.
So instead of hacking your own solution which works around the
accumulated idiosyncrasies of Maxima, I'll encourage you to propose
some changes to Maxima itself.
best
Robert Dodier