I could live with nthroot -- but is cuberoot (or curt or cbrt) so different 
from sqrt?  Anyway, it would be nice to have functions that resemble ones 
students see routinely without generating error messages.  I'm very much 
aware of the difficulties involved in reaching that goal, and I'll be 
patient.  

Still waiting for a solution on arcsec, as well.  There the issue is 
primarily plotting, although "integral" fails, even with a proper domain.  
numerical_integral works as it should.

In the great scheme of things, these are certainly peripheral issues -- and 
they wouldn't be issues at all if textbook authors didn't feel obliged to 
drag in every function they know about.  As author, I'll guilty of that too 
(fear of the adoption committee), but in my defense, we only do these 
things in exercises.

On Wednesday, June 18, 2014 8:48:36 PM UTC-4, kcrisman wrote:
>
> Just to chime in, as someone who has dealt with this question a lot 
> (though, perhaps ironically, never in a classroom situation):
>
> I would be very against a "cuberoot" function, but an "nthroot" function 
> where it was really clear what input was allowed could fly.  I appreciate 
> Greg's rationale.  Note however - what is the 0.1 power? Is that the same 
> as the 1/10 power?  This is a tricky floating point question to interpret. 
>
> I don't think that the slowdown would be too bad since it would primarily 
> be for pedagogical purposes for plotting.
>
> David, I don't know how this would work with integrals, though - we'd have 
> to see if Maxima had something equivalent.  Perhaps it could do a temporary 
> set of the Maxima domain to real somehow, if that is what allows Maxima to 
> do the "right thing" in this context, I don't know.
>
> Thanks for fighting the good fight on trying to resolve this once and for 
> all!
> - kcrisman
>

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