taylor series, bfloat, zerop enhancements, something to think about, vs. Macsyma



On 1/5/2012 7:46 AM, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 10:14, John Lapeyre <lapeyre.math122a at gmail.com 
> <mailto:lapeyre.math122a at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 01/04/2012 05:57 PM, Richard Fateman wrote:
>     > On 1/4/2012 8:42 AM, John Lapeyre wrote:
>     >> btw. I don't know if maxima has something like Head() or lisp's
>     >> type-of. It's useful to have a what_is_this() function.
>     >
>     > what_is_this(x):=if ?atom(x) then ?type\-of(x)   else ?caar(x)
>
> Not sure what exactly the goal is here.
Not sure either, but it could be used to dispatch to different 
numerical-style routines for
bigfloats
flonums
fixnums
bignums
  um, other stuff.