Hello,

I try to calculate "(1/i)*(1/i)" either in symbolic and numeric method and I get "1" and "-1" respectively.

Note that this problem does not appear with the expression "(1/i^2)".

In attachment a simple .sm file to illustrate the bug.

Best regards,
Gossage

---

bug_imag.sm (2 KiB) downloaded 65 time(s).

Hello Gossage,

I just can confirm this.
Have no explanation of this, except that this is definitely a bug.

Regards,
Radovan

There are other problems with the symbolic interpretation.
Did you tried to compute sin(-4*pi/3) and sin(2*pi/3) in the numeric and symbolic methods?

---

symbolictrouble.sm (17 KiB) downloaded 80 time(s).

Hi

These examples just illustrate the known fact that the SMath symbolic engine is unreliable. Currently, it is not safe to use it. The Numeric engine seems to be more reliable, thus it's usage can be recommended.

What to do if you need symbolic calculations? There is a plugin that communicates with a dos version of maple and is much more powerful than the SMath internal engine. However, the plugin is not localization-safe, i.e. if argument delimiter is set to semicolon ;

I would like SMath to be an 2D document interface to maxima, which has all the math (including units) one would need but lacks the MathCad like document interface.

Best regards, MK

Fixed.