[LON-CAPA-users] Response Math unable to understand formula forincorrect responses

[Gerd Kortemeyer]

Hi,

On Jan 30, 2012, at 12:13 AM, Seema Ali wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Is there a subtle difference between having the same is() expression in Maxima vs Lon Capa?

There should not be any difference, but there may be differences between different versions of Maxima. LON-CAPA distributes

Maxima 5.20.1 http://maxima.sourceforge.net
using Lisp SBCL 1.0.38-2.el5

Since Maxima was written as a command-line tool (with a human in front of the keyboard, who can interpret output and try things), they do not seem to be too worried about backward compatibility.

Having said that, some unexpected behavior may result from the fact that Maxima does not always automatically simplify. It seems like one has to force this at times using trigsimp(trigreduce(…)), so

is(trigsimp(trigreduce(expression1-expression2))=0);

may result in more reproducible results.

- Gerd.