On 3/14/10, Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> It would be a tremendous error to change the definition of great() to be
> slower.
There isn't any such absolute requirement. If we need to slow
down GREAT by a little bit in order to fix some bugs, it's well worth
the trouble.
> It would especially be a bad idea for it to call totaldisrep, etc.
Agreed, but it probably isn't necessary to call totaldisrep on
every argument.
> There is no reason to expect ?great(a,b) to work, in general, just as
> there is no reason for other lisp functions to be callable from the top
> level of Maxima.
Well, that's aside from the question of whether all expressions
should be comparable by GREAT. I don't see why they shouldn't be.
> orderlessp( [rat(x)], [rat(x)]) ---> error message. Orderlessp can
> only be used for ordering "general form" expressions, not <taylor,
> poisson, cre>. Please use totaldisrep (etc.) on the arguments first.
This is a bad surprise. Why should the poor user suspect
that some expressions are incomparable?
FWIW
Robert Dodier