Subject: Seeking areas of little or weak documentation
From: Richard Fateman
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 10:51:38 -0700
On 3/23/2011 10:19 AM, Henry Baker wrote:
> How about at least making it easy to pull up the source code for a particular function to examine? This was a very nice feature of the Lisp Machine, which I don't think has made it into the twenty-first century.
>
> Xmaxima or wxmaxima should be able to find (or be told) where the maxima sources are located in your file system, and then be able to pull up the source code for any function in the system.
Writing in Lisp (or C), I would expect emacs to do this for me via a
tags file created by the etags program.
Presumably a lisp program in Maxima could also use a tags file, if it
were told its location.
Creating a tags file for Maxima source should require very little effort.
I assume there is a way of defining a template for Maxima definitions
that could index code in the "share" or
other directories.
> Modern systems are neither address-space-constrained, nor file-system-space-constrained, so this capability should be a slam-dunk.
>
Certainly for many values of "modern".
RJF