Dear Fricas developers (I'm and not sure that this is the good forum to address my question, but I cannot find any other.)
First, thanks you all for your engagement to keep this great project alive! I'm a researcher in theoretical & mathematical physics with some knowledge (at different levels) of Mathematica (the current standard in th phys), Sympy, Maxima and Haskell. (No Lisp/Boot/Spad/Aldor alas!) In these days I'm trying to learn Fricas and I'm playing with the online sandbox. (As a sad aside, I must say that the current status of fricas installation & language documentation is "sub-obtimal" (I can give more details if you're curious). One must be much much more motivated than an average cas-beginner not to run away, to stay & progress. Of course this is not a blame, I understand that these tasks are tedious & heavily time consuming, and I see that there is some promising effort in progress.) The first thing I like to understand about a CAS is how evaluation works ...so, unable to find this topic on the documentation, I did some trials... And here's my question: a:=b; b:=1; [a,eval(a),simplify(a)] returns [b, b,b]. How can I force the interpreter in using the information that VALUE(b) = 1 in expressions containing a? This one-level evaluation behavior is similar to the one found in masyma, but there there is ev(a, infeval) which does the job and one gets 1. On the other hand Mathematica uses fixed-point infinite evaluation by default so it returns 1 for a. The answer: eval(a, 'b = b) returns 1 but it is not satisfactory to me because it requires the apriori knowledge of all the variables involved in Value (a). Is there a better way to get 1 from a, or maybe not having it is a feature of the language? Thanks for your time ric PS sorry if you received also an early version of this email, the first trial seemed to be blocked/delayed. Please ignore it. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
