Re: [Maxima-discuss] Interferences between packages (here: draw and vect)

[Robert D. <rob...@gm...>]

On 2016-03-31, Richard Fateman <fa...@be...> wrote:

> This is not a problem so much if you are writing in Lisp, where you
> can define symbols inside an package and explicitly export  (or import)
> particular names, or import whole packages.

I agree that the CL package system is suitable for organizing symbols.
I've assumed so far that we can't improve on it in Maxima (but maybe
that's not true, I dunno), so I made some effort to expose the CL
package system in the Maxima share package 'namespaces'.

> Part of the detraction of a package system is that if you (say) are in 
> package XXX and you look at a program FOO(R,S)  in package YYY,  then
> it is displayed as something like YYY:FOO(YYY:R,YYY:S)  .
>
> And if there is a variable Z returned from package YYY,    it will look 
> like YYY:Z unless you do something like importing it.

Yeah, that's a drag. I don't know if there's any way around it. But at
worst it's just a nuisance, right? so I think it's tolerable, given
symbol packages can help prevent bugs.

best

Robert Dodier