Question about new implimentation of kill

--- C Y  wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 00:56, C Y wrote:
> > If I'm understanding this correctly, kill now refuses to kill any
> > symbol not defined by the user?
> 
> Not quite. When kill is called on a symbol in the maxima package
> meeting a certain list of requirements, the symbol is restored to its
> original symbol value and property list. The symbols that get passed
> to kill when kill(all) is called are the members of the lists 
> enumerated in $infolists.

OK.  Is there a detailed description of those lists somewhere?  It
might be useful to document in more detail what is in them and why.

> Which values get passed to kill can be surprising. Nonethless, the
> results of kill should now be much, much less surprising than they
> were before.

Yes :-).  OK, I will dig some more into the idea of infolists, and
where post_eval_functions should be located in them.
 
> > In general this is good, but I have a specific instance (the 
> > proposed post_eval_functions list) where I would like kill to 
> > reset the value of this variable to an empty list (this
> > would, I think, be the "expected" end user behavior.)
> 
> Right. I think you want $post_eval_functions to behave more-or-less
> the way $rules does when it is handed to kill. $post_eval_functions 
> would then have to become a member of $infolists and a special case 
> might have to be added to the kill command. If you look at the code
> for kill, I am guessing you will find it much more complex than you 
> thought.

Very likely - I'll start digging.  Is there a "standard" place to
define specific behaviors for special cases of kill?
 
> I'm not sure what happened in your example because I don't know how
> you have implemented post_eval functions. Nonetheless, I wouldn't 
> expect the kill logic to automatically know what to do with your new 
> variable. That isn't the way it works.

OK, no problem.  I'll work on figuring out how to address this
"correctly". My error actually appears to be something different - I
haven't found it yet (grr).

Thanks much,
CY


		
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