Parentheses in Boolean expressions



box() works fine -- but box(E) isn't supposed to be equivalent to E -- that
would defeat its purpose.  That said, I'm not sure whether it's a bug or a
feature that box(x)-box(x) => 0....  Interestingly, in wxMaxima, box(a)+b
puts parentheses around the a, presumably to disambiguate
box(a)+box(b)+box(c) from box(a+b)+box(c).

Ah! I think I see what you mean -- put the parens operator in during the
nformat step -- but only when used for printing, not for part etc.

        -s


On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 5:17 PM, Richard Fateman <fateman at gmail.com> wrote:

>  On 10/3/2013 10:51 AM, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
>
>  Well, that would be trivial to do except that other Maxima functions
> would treat it as an unknown function.... Getting all of Maxima to treat
> parens(E) as equivalent to E would be a ... um ... challenge, don't you
> think?
>
>               -s
>
>  We already have box().
> Probably something that doesn't work.
> wxmaxima doesn't display boxes exactly, but changes the color.
>
>
> Anyway, I was thinking of inserting the extra parens()  functions only for
> display.
>
>
>