[Maxima] display all results of sqrt()

[Robert Dodier]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 7:50 AM, Leo Butler<l.butler at ed.ac.uk> wrote:

> (%i2) sqt(x) := block([], if listp(x) then map(sqt,x) else
> [-sqrt(x),sqrt(x)]);

I can't really do justice to this topic, so I'll settle for quibbling today ...

I want to discourage cruft. The "block" construct isn't needed, and
even if there were multiple expressions, in the absence of local variables
you can write just (e1, e2, e3) . It's hard enough to understand
what's going on without extra clutter.

Aside from that, this question of representing multiple values is
very interesting and I'm pretty sure we could figure out a way to
handle it in a way that is both useful and well-founded. It seems likely
that multiple values could be represented as sets. We probably
have to strengthen Maxima's ability to handle sets to make it work.

FWIW

Robert Dodier