Groups > comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica > #3501

Unwanted Recursion

From	Casorati <casorati@f-m.fm>
Newsgroups	comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica
Subject	Unwanted Recursion
Date	2011-07-06 09:35 +0000
Organization	Steven M. Christensen and Associates, Inc and MathTensor, Inc.
Message-ID	<iv1a95$sjl$1@smc.vnet.net> (permalink)

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I'm trying to define an anti-commutative algebra in Mathematica.
Here I will show only a minimal example to demonstrate my point.
The product of two elements a^b should be give by p[a,b] so I
make p flat:

SetAttributes[p, {Flat}]

But now I want p[a] to reduce to a.
Such a  rule would make other rules much simpler but when I define

p[a_] := a

the expression p[a] causes an infinite recursion. I get the message

$IterationLimit::itlim: Iteration limit of 4096 exceeded.

I have similar problems with p[]:=1 which makes mathematica puts
ones into the p : p[a]=p[a,a]=p[1,1,...,a] .

How can I solve this problem?

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Thread

Unwanted Recursion Casorati <casorati@f-m.fm> - 2011-07-06 09:35 +0000
  Re: Unwanted Recursion Kambis Veschgini <k.veschgini@thphys.uni-heidelberg.de> - 2011-07-07 11:29 +0000
  Re: Unwanted Recursion David Bailey <dave@removedbailey.co.uk> - 2011-07-07 11:39 +0000
    Re: Unwanted Recursion Kambis Veschgini <k.veschgini@thphys.uni-heidelberg.de> - 2011-07-08 09:01 +0000
    Re: Unwanted Recursion David Bailey <dave@removedbailey.co.uk> - 2011-07-08 09:01 +0000

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