[Maxima-bugs] [ maxima-Bugs-2808568 ] Reserved words that aren't reserved

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Bugs item #2808568, was opened at 2009-06-18 20:34
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by crategus
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Category: None
Group: None
>Status: Closed
>Resolution: Fixed
Priority: 5
Private: No
Submitted By: doug edmunds (dougedmunds)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: Reserved words that aren't reserved

Initial Comment:
Maxima version: 5.18.1
Maxima build date: 20:57 4/19/2009
host type: i686-pc-mingw32
lisp-implementation-type: GNU Common Lisp (GCL)
lisp-implementation-version: GCL 2.6.8

---
The manual (chapter 6.1) lists a group of words "which cannot be used as variable names".

However on testing, I find that several of them will accept variable assignments, without reporting
an error.  The following 7 'reserved words' will take an assignment: 

[integrate,
diff,
in,
at,
limit,
sum, 
product]

for example, 
limit: 20;
is accepted without error or warning.

The other reserved words will not accept variable assignment,  i.e. 

"step:1;"
Incorrect syntax: : is not a prefix operator
step:1


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>Comment By: Dieter Kaiser (crategus)
Date: 2009-10-11 13:13

Message:
As suggested the documentation has been clarified in Expressions.texi
revision 1.65.
Closing this bug report.
Dieter Kaiser


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Comment By: Robert Dodier (robert_dodier)
Date: 2009-07-08 22:57

Message:
I'm inclined to resolve this by just cutting out the stuff about reserved
words in the documentation. Maxima is pretty lenient about what you can do
with symbols, and that is entirely a good thing. You can do lots of
questionable stuff that other programming languages forbid. That's a
feature, not a bug.

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Comment By: Dieter Kaiser (crategus)
Date: 2009-06-22 01:09

Message:
These reserved words are not declared to be a SYSCONST. This can be
changed, e. g.

(setf (get '$integrate 'sysconst) t)

The following symbols are already declared to be a SYSCONST.

und, ind, zeroa, zerob, inf, minf, infinity, 
%pi, %i, %e, %phi, %gamma

Dieter Kaiser

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