Halfway symbolic halfway numeric evaluation on wxMAXIMA (Berns Buenaobra)

Hi
 Following Stavros suggestion.... 

 As a wxMaxima user, I find the present worksheet very nice and comfortable to use.
Menus are complete enough; section, subsection and other cell types have the essentials and the 'xml 2D display leads to very nice
output. There is place for great improvement there (e.g. :  "ad hoc" formating of a piece of selected text), but the essentials ans simplest tools are OK

A few suggestions I should find fine  (just as a matter of opinion, of course).

-At present, each new worksheet runs its own Maxima session. In other CAS systems, the same kernel session can be run on several
worksheets...  For some pourposes, this is convenient (e.g, just to test on a separate sheet how a particular simplification works at our current expressions....) but for other pourposes, the present "independent  sheets" model in wxMaxima is fine. Could this be optional? (e.g., a "preferences" choice).

-It should be nice if a  "contracted" section(subsection) could be transferred by simple copy+paste (cut+paste). At current implementations, just the section(subsection) title is transferred by copy/cut + paste.  Instead, all the lines of "contracted" cells  are
transferred. Transferring whole sections from a document to other should be much more easy...

-some menu operations just jump the cursor to the very end of the worksheet .  At present you can. e.g.  select on the display a part of an output and ask -via "menu" - for performing an  expand on it. You get the answer but at the very end of the  worksheet, instead of just at the end of the cell you are working in....  this can be very unfriendly.... mainly in "trial and error" essays.....

-for applied examples (e.g., in Phys, Chem, Engin.... ) having an available palette of symbols and greek letters for input should be a great help. Having  the possibility of nouns made of several greek letters should be also very nice, as well as just combinations of greek and latin letters, greek letters and numbers, etc...   

- I would suggest also that the "fpprintprec" option variable  to control the number of significant digits to print for ordinary float and bigfloat numbers could be set from the menu  (I would suggest at "Numeric" > "Set printing precision....").  

 
Regards

Pepe


El 17/04/2013, a las 15:44, Stavros Macrakis escribi?:

> 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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> 

________________________________________________________________
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	            
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