Fw: Ask explain text for the source core



On 7/9/12 9:26 AM, Robert Dodier wrote:
> Hi Jim, thanks for your interest in Maxima.
> 
> I've taken the liberty of forwarding your message
> to the Maxima mailing list.
> 
> The short answer to your question is that Maxima is
> a system for formal (that is, content-free) manipulation
> of expressions. Essentially Maxima comprises a lot of
> functions which look for patterns in expressions and
> replace the patterns with something else.

Is it really right that maxima just does pattern matching?  Or are you
saying "looking for patterns" in a more general sense?


>>  I am a student in mathematica major?and i want to study
>> the source core.But there are 
>> quite a few explain documentary in the /maxima/src address.
>> I wander if you have more 
>> information about this(explain the function of sinint
>> etc).And do you have any source 

sinint looks like it's not commented.  But the main indefinite
integrator is in sin.lisp, and there's a link to the paper that
describes how sin works.  Having said that, I think sinint mostly
handles integration of rational functions of certain forms.

I think you'll get much better answers if you asked a bit more focused
questions about how things work instead of just asking about
sinint.lisp.  Some files are just huge!

>> concerning LISP (Just to read the source code more easy).

For general Lisp, there are many web resources describing Lisp.  Or you
can get yourself a book on lisp, like Practical Common Lisp by Peter
Seibel or Lisp (somewhat old) by Winston and Horn.

Ray