#595 GENSYM exposes the variable gensym.number

[DanielAjoy]

Hi,

If I run the command GENSYM I expect to get a unique word.

I do get a unique word, however, the environment now has a variable called gensym.number

That is not documented as an expected behavior, and I opened this ticket so that gensym.number is buried by GENSYM...

but maybe it shouldn't be, because when we save the environment and load it at a later time we might want to keep guaranteeing unique words. I believe this is an unlikely use of this command.

I'm leaning towards:

• GENSYM should bury gensym.number
• The documentation should say something along the lines of:

"Outputs a unique word each time it is invoked during the current session. The words are of the form G1, G2, etc. When a fresh session is open the counter restarts at 1"

[David Costanzo]

UCBLogo 6.2.3 buries the variable and I don't see any plausible compatibility problems in doing that.

Your proposed update to the documentation sounds reasonable, too.

It's interesting that the names are documented as "G1, G2, etc." but generated as lowercase "g1, g2, etc.". I wonder if there's a story behind that. I may change the documentation to match the implementation.

[David Costanzo]

This is fixed by [r6087], which buries gensym.number. The help entry was also fixed, along the lines you suggested.

The fix will be available in whatever version follows 8.4.0.