> > The variable "a" in function
> > "bar" is free. Maxima has dynamic scope,
>
> Yes, it seems that I have to accept that.
> But I am not really happy with it.
Volker, you are unhappy with a design decision; this is not a bug.
The design decision was made almost 40 years ago, when lexical scope
in Lisp-like languages was not well understood.
That said, there have been many discussions about changing it. But
doing it is not just a question of implementation; it is also a
question of semantics, since Maxima has some interesting cases which
do not appear in ordinary programming languages, in particular the
relationship between programming variables which take values and
symbolic variables.
-s