Halfway symbolic halfway numeric evaluation on wxMAXIMA (Berns Buenaobra)

Hi
  My feeling is that wxMaxima works in a very similar way as Mathematica does in the sense explained by Stavros.
Once you have assigned numerical values to variables, you cannot use the same symbols for doing symbolic calculations
without deleting them, no matter the actual possition of your cursor.
In classroom exercises, I find  more practical using remvalue(....) and remfunction( ...  ) after each numerical example that just using
either  kill(..) or "restart Maxima" , but most surely each user finds his/her easiest way...

Best
Pepe

> Hi Stavros:
> 
> Thanks for the suggestion - I was a long time MathCAD user who is so used
> to it. So my work around is to create just a file for symbolics and another
> for numeric.
> 
> Regards,
> Berns B.
> 
> 
> On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 5:41 PM, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu>wrote:
> 
>> I believe this is the way wxMaxima is supposed to work. It has nothing to
>> do specifically with symbolic vs numeric, but with its semantics of
>> variable values. When you re- evaluate a cell, it uses current (dynamic)
>> variable values, not the values in effect at the time the cell was created
>> (textual or lexical order).  This can be very confusing, I agree. It also
>> means that re evaluating a cell that refers to % will not refer to the
>> textually preceding value, but the dynamically preceding value that was
>> calculated.

________________________________________________________________
Jose Sanchez-Marin.
 Universitat de Valencia.
 Spain 				   					e-mail: Jose.Sanchez at uv.es	   
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