greek letters in combined variable names (possibly drifting off-topic)

Bill Wood <william.wood3 at comcast.net> writes:

> On Fri, 2013-02-08 at 11:38 -0800, Richard Fateman wrote:
>    . . .
>> If this is the only problem you find with using computer algebra to 
>> express and
>> manipulate thermodynamics formulas for class, then you are doing well 
>> indeed.
>
> This sounds interesting, Richard.  Are there particular features of
> standard thermodynamics notational conventions that clash with CAS
> systems?

In thermodynamics you need very good support for partial derivatives
including:
 - support for functions of several arguments, up to four at least for
   starter, indefinite for practical tasks (the limit is around 30 in
   practical problems);
 - support for indexing expressions in some way, say
    {\frac{\partial G} {\partial {n_k}}}_{n_{i\neq k}};
 - support for other indices, e.g. mu^{sol}, mu^{liq}, mu^{st};
 - some auxilliary things like declaring functions homogeneous on a set
   of arguments (this is used very frequently) or declaring functional
   dependencies (e.g. "a depends on T but not on any n," this is used
   very frequently too).

Or, in general, support for analysis in high dimensions.

I'd say that Greek letters are of less importance, if you get accustomed
to calling your variables or parameters with non-single-letter abbreviations.


-- 
HE CE3OH...