On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 19:06, Rubens Marinho <marinho.rubens at gmail.com>wrote:
> ...with small r radcan works fine
> but with capital R it gives a wrong mathematical result.
>
Square root is a multi-valued function. Both the negative and positive
square roots are the "correct mathematical result". Yes, in numerical work
it is common to interpret sqrt as the positive square root, but that is
difficult or impossible to provide consistently in a symbolic system.
> Thank you for your attention and I congratulate to you to continue the
> work of William Schelter
>
We all appreciate Schelter's work as a maintainer and promoter of
Macsyma/Maxima, but he contributed none (or almost none) of the core of
Maxima. radcan, in particular, was written by Richard Fateman >>10 years
before Schelter worked on Macsyma/Maxima.
-s