revising ev, was: problem with "concatting variables"

Stavros Macrakis <macrakis <at> alum.mit.edu> writes:

> We should really define some clean functions for well-defined subsets
> of the functionality of ev.

Agreed.

>?In particular, eval(...) should do the obvious thing.
> It is trivial to define: (defun $eval (x) (meval x)). 

That's a good idea. It occurs to me that a user might expect
'eval' or any evaluation function to evaluate stuff in contexts
in which it isn't otherwise. 
E.g. '(1 + eval(x)) => (1 + <value of x>) ??
I'm not too attached to this idea -- just throwing it out for
consideration.

> Do we have any idea why Redfern et al. proposed this peculiar
> way of handling indexed variables? ?Is it a workaround for the
> failure of Maxima/Macsyma to treat subscripted variables as
> first-class variables in some contexts? ?(Can we inventory those
> contexts and fix them systematically?) 

Agreed.

best

Robert Dodier