Hi there,
I've been hunting through some core Maxima code to try to work out where
one could insert hooks to make simplifications etc. work sensibly with
bare objects. I noticed that MEQP, used for implementing is(equal(...)),
contains the following test (line 1000 or so of compar.lisp):
(cond
((or (like a b)) (not (member a indefinites)))
((or (member a indefinites) (member b indefinites)
(member a infinities) (member b infinities)) nil)
.... more tests ....
)
INDEFINITES contains $UND and $IND, so the first bit makes sense (LIKE
is checking for syntactic equality). But the next bit seems strange to
me. It has the effect that
(%i1) is(equal(inf, inf));
(%o1) true
(%i2) is(equal(inf, 1+inf));
(%o2) false
The first happens because of the LIKE test, the second because 1+inf
isn't an atom equal to inf.
This seems really odd to me. Is there a reason we have this behaviour?
Rupert
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