Rich,
You may disagree with these design decisions, but it's not right to call
them 'gratuitous incompatibilities'. There was a clear rationale for both
these decisions. What's more, backward compatibility with a system that has
been unsupported (and largely unavailable) for a decade, and whose most
recent common ancestor with Maxima was in 1982, doesn't seem like a high
priority.
-s
On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 12:42 AM, Richard Fateman
<fateman at cs.berkeley.edu>wrote:
> I just came across a program file written years ago for Macsyma, and
> tried running
> it on Maxima.
> First problem: the file assumes that upper and lower case are
> indistinguishable.
> I converted the file to lower case. (Is there a flag that would make
> this unnecessary??)
>
> Second problem: it uses intersection to compute the intersection of two
> sets represented as
> lists. Instead of just returning the answer (as a list), it gives an
> error message.
> Since it is already checking types, why not have it use the old version
> when the types
> are compatible with the old version? There are lots of places where
> lists are used
> and could be thought of as sets, e.g. lists of solutions from solve.
>
> I am still fiddling with it..
>
>
> RJF
>
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