--- Raymond Toy <toy@rtp.ericsson.se> wrote:
> I think it has to do with evaluation. On a clean maxima, if I type X
> at the prompt, I get X back because it's a variable. If I assign 42
> to X, when I type X at the prompt, what do you want to happen? You
> expect 42 to be printed. If you want "X" to be printed, you have to
> say 'X.
>
> This is what is happening with limit.
>
> I suppose we add code so that plus and minus were special so that you
> couldn't assign values to them, but this seems very ugly. Where do
> you stop? And why should I be disallowed from giving values to my
> variable named plus?
Hmm. OK, there are three possible ways to have this behave, as near as
I can tell.
1. The current way - if PLUS is assigned something, require that 'PLUS
be used.
2. Specify PLUS and MINUS as special in Maxima globally. Undesirable.
3. Have the limit command treat the strings PLUS and MINUS specially,
regardless of their contents, and otherwise allow PLUS and MINUS to be
variables. Only drawbacks here are that PLUS and MINUS variables
couldn't be fed to Limit command, and need to train the limit command
to handle this case.
I suppose the easiest thing is to leave it alone. I can't really see
people using PLUS and MINUS as variable names a whole lot, so it should
be safe enough.
CY
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