Wiki article about maxima's treatment of arrays and functions?

> Dan Stanger wrote:
> 
> > While a single namespace is bothersome, it is really quite simple
> > to replace all variables appearing in input expressions, with ones
> > which cannot occur in users input.

(Disclaimer: It seems I didn't get Dan's original mail, so maybe I
missed some discussion.)

Is this really so simple?  I suppose this refers to gensyms, in which
case I see two issues:

- If a gensym is part of something that is returned, the user can get
  hold of it by inpart() and similar operations; however, this is only
  a concern with a malicious user who tries to break things.  I would
  not be concerned with this, but other people's notion of robustness
  may differ.

- If you write an expression containing gensyms to a file, they will
  appear with their (not necessarily unique) names.  Again reading
  that file into Maxima creates Maxima variables that are not gensyms.

When I started to work with Maxima and used it a lot, I wrote quite a
bit of code to add the kind of constructs that fit my way of
thinking.  The two main definitions for dealing with gensyms were

- a simple macro with_gensyms() to evaluate some body after binding
  some symbols to gensyms; these gensyms had names derived from the
  original symbols (important for readability) and recorded the
  original symbol recorded as a property

- and function degensymify() that takes an expression and replaces all
  gensyms by interned Maxima symbols (with names obtained from the
  symbol originally given to with_gensyms()), optionally wrapping the
  whole thing in a with_gensyms() form.  The result is safe for
  writing to a file, as far as I can tell.

In case of interest, I can put up my utilities.max somewhere.

Regards,

Albert.