This is a continuation of the Lisp programming and
Emacs<http://www.math.utexas.edu/pipermail/maxima/2011/026250.html>thread,
which however, turned out to be a discussion about translating
Maxima functions, so it deserved another subject.
Ok, I managed to change the code so that it can finally get translated, but
the results are disappointing at the moment. It works, it gives correct
results (which differ very slightly, compared to the untranslated code, but
this is expected.)
However, the big surprise is that program execution lasts slightly longer,
compared to the untranslated version. I suspect (and please correct me if
I'm wrong) that this happens because I needed to mode_declare almost all
local variables as "any". Proper declaration is "float" but if I do that, I
get several warning messages like:
WARNING-> Assigning variable k1, whose mode is float,a value of mode any.
Not only that, but the code doesn't work as well. I don't know how
translation works, but I guess if most local variables are declared as
"any", translation doesn't really do anything useful. Moreover, other
options for mode declaring, such as "fixednum" and "number" are not
documented, as far I can tell.
Any guidelines about effective translation would be appreciated.