If you want to look at possible definitions of solve that have been refined more recently than Maxima's solve, you can look at Mathematica's Solve, NSolve, RSolve, Reduce, and maybe some others like Eliminate.
Maxima's solve dates to 1971, but there is also linsolve, algsys, realroots, and some other programs that you can probably find in the documentation ... roots, newton... and there may also be numerical rootfinders in the Fortran library. The decision as to whether to_poly_solve does the job for you (apparently not, at least at the moment) or not, is only one aspect. I am pleased that you consider, at least as an option, augmenting Maxima by loading in programs into Maxima written in the Maxima language (to_poly_solve). Maybe someone would define what you want Sage's "solve" to do in all cases, and feed the disambiguation information to a short Maxima program that then calls solve, to_poly_solve, roots, etc etc as necessary. You might even find that your short program would be useful to people directly using Maxima. There is, in my experience, a gap between people who think that all roots of a polynomial can be found [by complex rootfinders] and those people who want exact algebraic expressions. Or those who want rational isolating intervals for each real root, computed by Sturm sequences. And then there are the people who need to represent infinite sets like the roots of sin(x)=0. The gap between these groups is kind of cognitive. Like "what do you mean you can't find the roots of a quintic because it is unsolvable?? It has 5 roots!" etc RJF --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
