Seeking areas of little or weak documentation

Henry and Richard,

Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoroughly to my post.

I see a common thread in your responses -- that there are areas of Maxima
where information is not well organized/catalogued.

As a person completely new to Maxima I don't have any bearings to tell me
where I could make a significant contribution given a reasonable amount of
effort. I'm certainly willing to put in the time to learn the software and
to gain experience in what I'm going to write about. I aim to be one of
those technical writers who writes with sufficient depth to distinguish
himself from those who don't. So, it's in my best interest to contribute
something of value. At the same time I don't want to take on something
bigger than I can chew.

Richard Fateman writes:

> I also have periodically suggested that an alphabetized listing of error
> messages and what they mean would be a service.

What is the effort involved in cataloguing all the error messages? Is it a
matter of scraping the source code and then figuring out what each error
means?

Henry Baker writes:

> I would like to see an entry on every single constant, variable and function that Maxima knows anything
> about, showing exactly what Maxima knows about it.

How would one go about finding that information?

Henry also writes:

> The huge number of various flags in Maxima is very difficult to understand.  Any documentation of a
> function _has_ to indicate _exactly which_ flags will affect its behavior.  This process could be
> mechanized in the Maxima test suite: every function can be laboriously tested with every combination
> of flags.  Maxima can use the transitive closure of the function calling graph to mechanically compute
> from the source code which flags affect which functions.

Again, I'm interested to know the scope of the effort to catalog
functions and their flags.

I appreciate the dialog.

Sol