While working on some Bessel routines for maxima (via f2cl), I ran
into an annoying thing: maxima is littered with special variables
with short, simple names.
For example, P is a special variable that prevented my Bessel code
from working because it used P as an array to hold some coefficients
for the approximation. Since P is special, the code accessed the
special variable instead of my array. Ugh.
It would be nice if they followed the usual Lisp practice of
surrounding the name with *'s. It would also be nice if maxima used
lexical scope, but perhaps that's a bit too much to ask for right now.
Ray