It appears Gnuplot doesn't provide any complete reset function. The accepted answer for this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64498369/total-reset-of-a-gnuplot-session has some details about working around the issue.
Another possibility is Gnuplot's save command, which writes current settings into a file, which can be loaded via Gnuplot's load command. I see save treats the set term value specially; one has to save save term to get the set term string! Yikes. I wonder if save has been made more comprehensible in more recent versions (I'm working with Gnuplot 5.0).
I encountered another example of this bug; the gnuplot_svg_background leaks from one plot to the next when plot_format is gnuplot_pipes, but not when it is gnuplot. See the examples for that in tests/rtest_plot.mac. Looking at the Gnuplot documentation (Gnuplot 5.0 for the record -- I know that's old), I see it says: (quote) The following are not affected by reset. set term set output set loadpath set fontpath set linetype set encoding set decimalsign set locale set psdir set fit Note that reset...
update to 'apply' documentation ...
I don't see why Maxima should prohibit differentiating with respect to a constant. Surely it's equivalent to just renaming the variable, carrying out the operation, and naming it back again.
restructure 'format' package table info
Create texinfo documentation for package 'format'
Merged into master as commit 805c385 which comprises both commits shown here. I have some follow-up questions about it which I'll raise on maxima-discuss.