--- Barton Willis <willisb@unk.edu> wrote:
>
[snip]
>
> Changes:
>
> (1) A user can only unprotect a symbol that has the 'user-protected
> property; a user is no longer able to unprotect members infolists.
Very nice :-).
> (2) Protect and unprotect no longer evaluate their arguments.
That should be a usability help.
> (3) Protect and unprotect now return done instead of true. I think
> this is better.
Logically it does make more sense as a message to return - what is the
distinction between DONE and TRUE in Maxima?
> Bugs:
>
> (1) Protection only protects against assignment; a user can make
> assumptions on a protected symbol.
Would we want to protect against assumptions?
> (2) Protect is global -- I think fixing this would require lots of
> changes to Maxima.
Yep, that's my guess. We should probably plan that discussion for one
of the 5.9.x releases. I'm guessing that might impact a lot of
development down the line.
> Other:
>
> I'm undecided whether including this protect / unprotect scheme
> would be good or bad for Maxima.
What negative effects do you forsee?
> Barton
>
> PS Reading the mset source I learned of the undocumented
> option variable SUBSCRMAP
> [snip]
> This is very odd -- the assignment mapping uses outermap1.
> Macsyma eliminated subscrmap and made [a,b] : [x,y] equivalent
> to a : x, b : y.
a : x, b : y is what I would have expected - any idea why they have the
other behavior available?
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