[Maxima] to_poly_solve

[Dan Hatton]

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008, Barton Willis wrote:

> No, there is no user documentation for either to_poly_solver or
> to_poly.  If you would, report this as a bug and assign the task to
> me. In the long run, solve should be improved making to_poly_solver
> unnecessary. Till then, to_poly_solver needs some user documentation.

Thanks Barton.  I've made the bug report.  In the meantime, I took a
look in the source code, which I think told me what I wanted to know.
Just to check: when to_poly_solve says "Assuming that expr # 0", does
the "#" mean "not equal to"?

Something else that arose from the source code... the comments therein
suggest that to_poly(expr,var) is only intended to produce a
polynomial with roots at the same values of var as expr, not a
polynomial that's exactly the same everywhere as expr.  So does this
mean that when I run to_poly_solve(equation,var), I need to make sure
equation has zero on one side?

-- 

Thanks again,

Dan Hatton