Lisp strings vs maxima strings?



Hi Ray, you wrote in part:

> 1) Should maxima strings be printed out as strings? 
>    It seems they should be.
> 2) Is it allowed for the user to change file_search_maxima
>    (and friends)?  If so, it seems broken.

(1) If "printed out as strings" means "printed with quote
 marks", there is (surprise surprise) an undocumented Lisp
 flag, STRINGDISP or ?stringdisp, which controls that. 

 I wonder why STRINGDISP is turned off by default. 
 Operators such as "foo" (e.g. infix("foo"), 10 foo 5) are not
 printed with quote marks even when STRINGDISP is on, so I 
 guess that's not why. Maybe it's because quoted strings 
 are printed with quotes by print, which is not usually what
 you want if you're doing print ("foo is", foo), etc.
 But we can easily make print a little smarter.

(2) Looks to me like the search stuff is broken wrt Maxima
 strings; :lisp (setq $file_search_maxima '((mlist) "foo"))
 is OK, while not &foo ? The pre-5.9.1 description of
 file_search claims the user can modify file_search_maxima,
 etc., and I don't see any reason to prevent that.

For what it's worth,
Robert Dodier

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