Package: mathomatic Version: 16.0.5-4 Severity: normal Dear Tony,
Thank you very much for maintaining Debian's mathomatic package. It's colorful and easy to use. The main reason I'm writing is to give a specific example suggesting, at least to yours truly, that ol' mathomatic might try to simplify math expressions containing exponents/powers a little too agressively. When I type this at a linux bash shell command line... $ mathomatic -e -- "(X^2)^0.50001" mathomatic returns 1-> (X^2)^0.50001 #1: X^1.00002 As you can see, mathomatic automatically simplifyed the "^2" and "^0.50001" powers into just "^1.00002" But, I'm worried that if the X variable contains a *negative* number, mathomatic's automatic "simplification" may lead to "complex" imaginary numbers and so called "Not a Number"s (ie: "NaN"s) down stream. To be fair, mathomatic's documentation admits "With Mathomatic, if x is imaginary, you may get an unwanted imaginary result" at https://fossies.org/linux/mathomatic/doc/manual.html I humbly suggest 1.) Consider enhancing mathomatic to give its user more control over when and how aggressively it simplifies exponents. Three options are reviewed at https://docs.sympy.org/latest/tutorial/simplification.html#powers Mathomatic's "simplify" command already has a "symbolic" option that approaches a fix. You can see this is so at https://fossies.org/linux/mathomatic/doc/am.html#simplify 2.) Use python's sympy module instead. But it's not quite as easy or colorful. Thanks again, Kingsley -- System Information: Debian Release: bullseye/sid APT prefers unstable-debug APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'unstable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 4.4.0-1-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU threads) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages mathomatic depends on: ii libc6 2.33-7 ii libedit2 3.1-20210910-1 ii m4 1.4.18-2 mathomatic recommends no packages. Versions of packages mathomatic suggests: ii gnuplot 5.2.7+dfsg1-3 ii gnuplot-x11 [gnuplot] 5.2.7+dfsg1-3 pn rlwrap <none> -- no debconf information