[seqfan] Re: metadata for Mathematica code

[Alonso Del Arte]

> may I suggest that another good name would be ispalindrome (Maple style)

That, or even isPal would be a thousand times better than any single letter.

Surely an automated parser could be programmed to recognize "is" followed
by a capital letter as a membership test function just as if its name ended
with a capital "Q" preceded by a lowercase letter.

This would cause no conflict with Mathematica's built-in HypergeometricPFQ
(the "Q" is not preceded by a lowercase letter) nor with some function we
may want to define like isoscelesLenghts (because the "o" would not be
capitalized).

> When you are working on sequences it is essential to be able
to grab a program for it in your favorite language (Maple in my case)

If that program produces the correct results, that's really the only thing
the editors should be expected to enforce.

But just looking a little bit further ahead: what if you want to compute a
slightly different sequence but you don't understand how the program came
by its results? You compute a couple of terms by hand but that gives you a
thousand OEIS results.

On the other hand, if the program is crystal clear, it might be easy to see
that you can just insert a 2 * somewhere or change a EulerPhi to
CarmichaelLambda or a not equal to a less than or whatever little change
produces the slightly different sequence you're wondering about.