On 4/16/10, Mikhail Khokhlov <aeol at mail.ru> wrote:
> I've noticed that Maxima often changes the order of operands in sums that I
> enter. Is it
> possible to suppress this behavior, so that when I enter "a + b", I get "a +
> b" and not "b + a"?
Maxima has an idea of a canonical ordering for terms in a "+" expression.
The global flag powerdisp controls how "+" expressions are displayed.
Try powerdisp:true to reverse the ordering from the default.
> And one more possibly related question: is there any way to disable
> automatic simplifications,
> so that "a/a" would remain "a/a" until I explicitly ask it to simplify to
> "1"?
simp:false turns off the simplifier. Note that very little happens
in Maxima without the simplifier. Perhaps that's exactly what
you want.
There isn't a really convenient way to preserve individual expressions
from simplification. lambda([], FOO) preserves FOO unsimplified
but, aside from being clumsy, there isn't much one can do with that.
What do you want to accomplish?
best
Robert Dodier