On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 2:31 PM, Richard Fateman
<fateman at eecs.berkeley.edu>wrote:
> ...The internal operator in 1/2 is 'rat' which requires 2 integer
> operands. A special case
> could be set to create f(1)/f(2) which is really f(1) * f(2)^(-1) in
> this example, but
> I'm not sure that map should do that.
>
Well, part/args/op treat 1/2 as "/"(1,2) already, even though ?caar(1/2) =
RAT and ?caar(a/b) = MTIMES.
One weird thing here is that mapatom treats 1/2 as atomic even though
part/args/op are perfectly content to treat it as composite; understandable
in the a[i] case, but why the 1/2 case?
Actually, I think that 1/2 is "a number" and thus atom(1/2) should be
> true. But this atom
> concept is not very accurately portrayed. Atoms should be
> non-decomposable, except
> by nuclear fission..
>
Sure, but you might also want to think of 1+%i, 2^(1/2), and 1+%pi as
number literals... :-)
-s