[Maxima] proposal for option to suppress input and output labels

[Robert Dodier]

On 2/8/07, Chris Sangwin <sangwinc at for.mat.bham.ac.uk> wrote:

> Both --noninteractive and --very-quiet would be very useful indeed.

Thanks for the feedback.

> What do you propose to do with error messages?

I'm sure we'll all agree that error messages should always be written
to the same place as C stderr (I believe this is always file descriptor 2).
However, neither Maxima nor Lisp is on our side here.
Maxima should write error messages to the CL special variable
*ERROR-OUTPUT* -- that is easy to fix. A bigger problem is that
there's no guarantee that the Lisp implementation maps that to fd 2 --
experimenting a little on my Linux box, I find Clisp, GCL, and Allegro all
send *ERROR-OUTPUT* to fd 1 (i.e. stdout). SBCL sends it to fd 2
as we would hope. I don't know how much work it is to convince a
random CL that *ERROR-OUTPUT* should go to fd 2. Maybe it's very easy.

Be that as it may, the current proposal doesn't change anything about
Maxima's error messages.

FWIW
Robert