Subject: how to pass the name of a variable as argument?
From: Robert Dodier
Date: Fri, 2 May 2008 10:00:57 -0600
On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 6:14 PM, Oliver Kullmann
<O.Kullmann at swansea.ac.uk> wrote:
> Since global variables should be avoided,
Bear in mind that, in Maxima, effectively ALL variables are global variables,
or, more precisely, global variables and local variables act the same.
All variables have dynamic scope, not lexical scope.
As you doubtless know, dynamic scope can lead to subtle misbehavior.
A lexically-scoped user language could be very useful.
Instead of revising the existing Maxima language, at this point I think
the easiest way to get lexical scope is to run a different language
on top of Lisp. One possibility is Python; there is a CL implementation
of Python name CLPython. The developer is talking about porting it
to SBCL.
FWIW
Robert Dodier