On Tue, 2010-07-13 at 15:20 +0200, Mein Linuxrechner Arbeit wrote:
> I often have to do calculations manually. For that purpose, I do not
> need mighty functions. But what I need is to use the results of
> calculations in the follow-up calculations. I looked in the maxima
> documentations, but there I find descriptions of mighty functions,
> but rarely example how to use maxima as a simple helper doing manual
> calculations.
Hello "Linuxrechner",
from what you describe, it seems that you have been looking at the
"Reference Manuals", which are meant for people who already have some
proficiency with Maxima. If you have not done it yet, look at the
manuals in the "Tutorials in English" section in
http://maxima.sourceforge.net/documentation.html
They are all very good in different aspects. You might also want to look
at the "Tutorial in German" section, but my knowledge of German is not
enough to tell you whether they are good or not.
>From what I've seen in your previous posts, you seem to be used to
numerical programs which will cause unexpected behavior in a symbolic
program. For instance, at some point Maxima gave you a result such as:
(%o12) a = some_expression
and after that you tried replacing s by a, expecting to get
"some_expression". Well, the = sign above does not imply that "a" has
been set up to be equal to "some_expression"; "a" continues to be an
undefined variable name. What is true above is that the equation
"a = some_expression"
has been saved in an internal variable named %o12
I hope this helps you get started. Regards,
Jaime