Why cannot Maxima calculate some simple sums



My mistake! That message was supposed to go to the user who asked about
  it, not  to the entire list!  

  In fact it might take a few hours of work to put 'Sum'
 features in 'sum' (assuming  those features were desired)
 to avoid breaking something.) I didn't really want to try
 to discuss that right now!


> > I've also noticed this. Will anything be done about it?
> 
> I wrote a Mathematica-like Sum function that unifies a
> few things. Maybe some of it can be used in maxima.