Just to chime in, as someone who has dealt with this question a lot (though, perhaps ironically, never in a classroom situation):
I would be very against a "cuberoot" function, but an "nthroot" function where it was really clear what input was allowed could fly. I appreciate Greg's rationale. Note however - what is the 0.1 power? Is that the same as the 1/10 power? This is a tricky floating point question to interpret. I don't think that the slowdown would be too bad since it would primarily be for pedagogical purposes for plotting. David, I don't know how this would work with integrals, though - we'd have to see if Maxima had something equivalent. Perhaps it could do a temporary set of the Maxima domain to real somehow, if that is what allows Maxima to do the "right thing" in this context, I don't know. Thanks for fighting the good fight on trying to resolve this once and for all! - kcrisman -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-edu+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-edu@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
