Customary is (in order)
1. ignore the possibility of name conflicts
2. use strange prefixes.
This is not ideal.
RJF
Albert Reiner wrote:
>Hi,
>
>unless I have read the documentation wrong, there is nothing like
>packages or namespaces etc. in Maxima. So what do you do to keep
>auxiliary definitions from getting into the way of the user? I can
>see these possibilities:
>
>- use "unlikely" names, via some naming convention such as a prefix,
> e.g., my_prefix_auxiliary(x):=...: A user who calls a function
> starting with my_prefix_... presumably knows what he does; however,
> these long identifiers are quite inconvenient when writing the
> actual code.
>
>- make the auxiliaries part of the real function,
> e.g. foo(x):=block([auxil: lambda(...)], ...): This makes it
> difficult to test the auxiliary by itself, it does not work with
> macros, it's unmodular, and you get into trouble when one auxiliary
> is used by several definitions.
>
>- wrap everything with a macro that checks whether a symbol already
> exists, and replaces it with a prefixed version: I don't know
> whether this would work.
>
>- ignore the possibility of name conflicts.
>
>Anything I am missing? And what is customary?
>
>TIA,
>
>Albert.
>
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