Dear Leo
Thanks a lot for your help.
I'm aware now that perhaps my problem is much dependent of the environment.
Let me explain that my concern is about using wxMaxima in both MacOSX and windows environments
for teaching chemistry and physics to BSc students. Providing them with the possibility of handling symbols that they find in their textbooks encourages them to use Maxima as Computer Algebra System (CAS) for solving exercises, derive expressions, etc...
I have not difficulties in using greek symbols followed by subindexes, e.g
(%i1) %alpha[1] : %mu[1] * %omega[3]
and I get a very nice product of the greek symbol for letter mu with a subindex 1 and letter omega with subindex 3
That's OK. No problem. A good possibility when it matches (e.g, in vector algebra for mechanics, dipole moments, etc...)
Now, let us suppose I need using some Thermodynamical expression requiring the use of, lets say, "DeltaG", such as it appears in chemistry textbooks, (a %Delta and a G denotating the increment of the Gibbs potential, and used as a single variable). It is there where I'm facing difficulties, hence my question, that I tried to raise on a more general context:
Is there a way of combining in a single variable name the greek symbols and conventional alphanumeric characters?
Of course, as you say, in any utf8 lips environment, no problem...
Unfortunately, this seems not to be the case for the wxMaxima implementations in MacOSX and windows available at my classrooms...
Thanks again for your patience if you have read up to here!!
Best wishes
Jose Sanchez
ICMol
University of Valencia (Spain)
El 08/02/2013, a las 16:17, Leo Butler escribi?:
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> Hi!
> Is there some way of composing variable names including greek letters?
> I meant to have variable names similar to=20
> a1: <expr1>;
> a2: <expr2>;
> a: a1*a2;
>
> but using, let's say , greek "alpha" instead of latin "a"
>
> Of course, I know that one gets alpha letter by writing %alpha or =
> \aplha ,
> but by writing %alpha1=20
> you get just the same %alpha string instead of the alpha symbol =
> followed by a 1....
>
> Jose, I am not sure if I understand your question, but any Lisp that
> understands utf8 encoding will let you use the utf8 'characters' as
> input to maxima.
>
> Eg.
>
> (%i1) ? : 1;
>
> (%o1) 1
> (%i2) [?, ?];
>
> (%o2) [1, 1]
>
> (%i3) makelist(?[i],i,1,4);
>
> (%o3) [? , ? , ? , ? ]
> 1 2 3 4
>
> The first symbol is mu (#\MICRO_SIGN), the second
> #\LATIN_SMALL_LETTER_SHARP_S.
>
> I have done this in emacs with sbcl+maxima. Other front-ends may or
> may not handle utf8 characters correctly.
>
> Btw, entering utf8 codepoints is rather slow and painful, but if this
> is what you want, you can set up an abbrev table in emacs to
> automatically insert your favourite characters. Ymmv with other
> editors.
>
> Leo
>
________________________________________________________________
Jose Sanchez-Marin.
Universitat de Valencia.
Institut de Ciencia Molecular (ICMol).
Cat. Jose Beltran Martinez, 2 Phone: +34 96 354 4444
E-46980 Paterna FAX: +34 96 354 3576
Spain e-mail: Jose.Sanchez at uv.es
_________________________________________________________________