Maxima error when having strings in terms

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 9:33 PM, Robert Dodier <robert.dodier at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 10:22 AM, Matthew Gwynne
> <mathew.gwynne at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I was wondering what the status of this string-handling bug was? Is it
>> likely to be fixed in future releases?
>
> It hasn;t been fixed yet. I will take a look at it,
> but it will be a couple of days. If I remember correctly
> it should be easy to fix; I am inclined to commit it to
> the 5.21 release branch so it would appear in a 5.21.1 release.

Ah, thanks!

>
>> I am doing work using terms and strings in very similar ways and so am
>> just wondering where things stand..
>
> What are you working on? I am always interested to hear
> what people are doing with Maxima.

I'm working on the analysis of boolean functions (usually only
partially specified, so we deal with different extensions of these),
different representations of these functions, and then algorithms and
their complexities for generating such representations.

When dealing with the boolean variables in these problems, they come
from specific pre-existing datasets with string names, but the idea is
to have reasonably generic analysis tools to get a basic summary of a
particular function before investigating further, and so being able to
treat variable names in the same way as Oliver is suggesting rather
than converting them into maxima terms is attractive. One might also
want new variables, and then certain parameters can be added to these
functional terms.

>
> best
>
> Robert Dodier
>

Thanks

Matthew