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

[Roland S. <ma...@ro...>]

> From: Robert Dodier [mailto:rob...@gm...]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2016 10:27 PM
> There are a couple of language features which would help a lot, namely lexical scope and a namespace system.
> There has been some interest in the former lately, and as for the latter, there is the share package namespaces which
> attempts to expose the Common Lisp package (i.e. namespace) system. So there is some hope although not a lot is
> happening right now.

Probably there are much more conflicts between packages than the ones we are discussion presently. The present ones are
just examples. They show how important a search for strategies to avoid such conflicts is and how important to possibly
establish protection systems or guidelines for programming packages, be they in .lisp or .mac.

Just to show you a sample user's situation: I would like to use draw, vect and vector_rebuild in parallel, that is all
in one wxMaxima file (.wxm). So presently I have to do without vector_rebuild completely (by the way, its description
mentions explicitly the incompatibility with vect. And vect by the way is a .mac) because I need vect to calculate some
differential operators. Draw and vect I also cannot use in parallel, so I cannot run through evaluating the whole .wxm
file but have to split evaluation for the vect and the draw parts. This is sometimes not possible, e.g. if I want to
draw the results computed by vect, etc. etc. The path becomes narrower and narrower and then comes the point where the
way stops.

Of course there are private workarounds: I could compute the differential operators with my own functions. And I could
try to find an equivalent to vector_rebuild's vector_factor function (I still consider this package's functionality to
be very nice and useful). But this tends to be a lot of work and costs a lot of time which the user would rather spend
for the computations he intends to do.

Such a situation becomes tiresome to any user. He will lose interest in combining packages and is, thus, very much
limited in what he wants to do.

Best regards,
Roland