Here is an exsumption to the survival rule "hands off symbolic optimization"

It is well known that you can easily corrupt computations with complex numbers if you accidentally re-define the imaginary unit i.
The attached (fully bilingual german/english) sheet demonstrates that making a definition symbolic can mitigate the impact in such cases. However, keep in mind that this situation arises just from breaking another rule

The zip file contains part of an experimental handbook prototype. Just open Math complex.sm to see the example. If you like it, you might vote for some editing features in SMath as for example adding link targets to text regions. Currently I do that in the document xml source. The idea is to have a function index much like in the pdf handbook but with live examples and accessible let say by pressing F1 (open doc) if you are on a function name in a math region. Should not be too complicated, just provide a location where to put individual interlinked sm files and open the right one upon F1.

I am not sure, how such a handbook can be extended by the community (e.g. translated to other languages) and still be consistently maintained without having a single person to manage the contributions. An automatic index and cross reference generator together with a file name convention or some chapter assignment tag (function reference, plugin description, concept description...) might be a good idea. Perhaps the SVN repository could be used for source management.

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activebook.zip (15 KiB) downloaded 217 time(s).

The handbook prototype is now in svn. A current snapshot is attached.

Updated.

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Activebook.zip (1 MiB) downloaded 126 time(s).