Wilhelm,
Parentheses are not part of the internal representation, and dpart does not
'drop' parentheses, it simply puts part of the expression in a box
-- dpart(...) is precisely equivalent to substpart(box(piece), ...). The
output renderer decides where parentheses are needed and how to show boxes.
It sounds as though wxMaxima's renderer doesn't show boxes in the ideal
way.
I am not a regular user of wxMaxima, and I tried using 'box' and 'dpart',
but saw no change at all in the output (no box, no color). I am running
Windows prebuilt Maxima 5.25.1, wxMaxima version 0.8.7. According to the
wxMaxima page, though, "wxMaxima 11.08.0 is included with Maxima
5.25.0<https://sourceforge.net/projects/maxima/files/Maxima-Windows/5.25.0-Windows/maxima-5.25.0.exe/download>";.
So perhaps this is a very out-of-date version (in which case we need to
update the distribution!). Sorry I can't help....
-s
On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 09:14, Wilhelm Haager
<wilhelm.haager at htlstp.ac.at>wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The Command "dpart", wich obviously calls the function "box",
> drops surrounding parentheses, as the box operator
> (which means "red color" in wxMaxima)
> has precedence over other operators.
> But this can lead to optically unpleasant outputs; eg.
> dpart(a*(b+c)*d,2)
> leads to the confusing output
> a*c+b*d ("c+b" red colored - I know this has precedence, but it's
> looking awfully).
>
> I think, it would be nice to retain the parentheses around "c+b",
> in the case above
> a*(c+b)*d
>
> Wilhelm
>
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