On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 7:22 PM, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu>wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 16:44, Robert Dodier <robert.dodier at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> ...Well, I'd like to see stuff like this: compute the mean / variance /
>> etc
>> of [a, b, c] where a, b, and c are symbols, intervals, objects which
>> represent some special-purpose implementation (e.g. multiple precision
>> numbers), expressions like 2 i + 3 j - 4 k, dimensional quantities
>> (feet, meters, etc), or ordinary numbers, or combinations thereof.
>>
>
> Well, yes, right now, neither Maxima nor R can deal with arbitrary-type
> arithmetic objects for most operations. R, though it has a wealth of
> object systems (some standard and others added on), has no standard
> functions which can operate with opaque arithmetic types.
>
> Maxima almost succeeds in supporting bigfloats everywhere it supports
> floats, but not quite, so adding
>
What's missing with bfloats?
> anything that doesn't behave like a number is probably a fair amount of
> work (e.g. for intervals, trichotomy doesn't hold).
>
> Of course, Maxima has the advantage that it does support arbitrary
> symbolic expressions, so it doesn't assume things like trichotomy in
> general. Still, I don't see that anyone has succeeded in building a
> reasonably complete and efficient interval arithmetic system on top of it.
>
>
Do you want symbolic intervals too?
Ray