Halfway symbolic halfway numeric evaluation on wxMAXIMA (Berns Buenaobra)

I don't know either Mathematica or MathCAD.  Perhaps those of you who are
could suggest improvements to wxMaxima based on their worksheet systems?

             -s


On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 7:22 AM, Pepe Sanchez <jose.sanchez at uv.es> wrote:

> 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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