On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 5:16 PM, Dieter Kaiser <drdieterkaiser at web.de> wrote:
> Am Dienstag, den 20.10.2009, 16:36 -0600 schrieb Robert Dodier:
>> I don't think it's worth the trouble to try to fix status and sstatus.
>> I think we ought to just cut them both.
>> If someone wants to work with Lisp *FEATURES* then they
>> can write some Lisp code for it.
>
> Yes, you are right, but unfortunately, both functions are used by some
> packages. So we have first to change the implementation of the packages,
> or support two functions status and sstatus which have the same
> functionality, but do not use the Lisp *features*.
I looked for instances of status and sstatus in the share code
and I think it would be easy to cut out the use of status and sstatus.
> By the way: It might be good to have a standard way to register a
> package in Maxima and to have a look what external packages are loaded.
> This might be interesting for debugging and bug reporting too.
Well, not the same thing, but something related is the namespaces
package in share, which just exposes the Lisp package system to
the Maxima user. The namespaces global variable is a list of all
defined namespaces. If each share package were loaded into its
own namespace, then namespaces is a list of loaded packages.
Another idea is that if there were a Maxima "require" system, that
could obviate the need of the user to inspect the list of loaded
packages. e.g. user says require(foo); without needing to know
whether foo is already loaded.
FWIW
Robert Dodier