Re: [Maxima-users] What is special about the variable c ?

On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 07:46, Helge Hafting wrote:
> The documentation states that capitalization matters, i.e. x and X are 
> separate.

Actually, it's more complicated than that. Lowercase symbols are
converted to uppercase when they are first created if the uppercase
version already exists. There is general (if not universal) consensus
that this behavior needs to be changed. We plan to make case sensitivity
straightforward (x and X will always be different) in Maxima 5.9.2.

> Thats fine, but this seems to not apply to "c"?

There are several symbols that get mysteriously upcased because of the
behavior defined above. "c" is one of them. (Actually, I think that "c"
will no longer be mysteriously upcased in 5.9.1, but it's really an
accident.) 

> (C1)  a+A+b+B+c+C+d+D;
> (D1)  d + D + 2 C + b + B + a + A

Ouch. This is a particularly bad example. 

> This seems "too easy" to notice for a bug, so I wonder - is it supposed
> to be like that for some reason, or is maxima wrong?

It's partly bug, partly bad design. This sort of weird behavior should
be fixed once and for all in the 5.9.2 release of Maxima.

--Jim

P.S. Even though there is a legacy maxima-users list on sourceforge, all
the real discussion goes on in maxima@www.ma.utexas.edu.