On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 11:39 AM, nijso beishuizen <nijso at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I was looking in some of the maxima routines and I was wondering:
> what does declare(x,special) do to x?
> I couldn't find it in the maxima manual. No 'special' is mentioned in the
> description of declare.
It's obsolete, probably we should have cut out that stuff long ago.
I'm pretty sure it has no effect whatsoever.
For the record, all Maxima variables are special variables in the
sense of Lisp special variables (from which the Maxima special
declaration was copied, I suppose). From time to time I wish that
Maxima implemented some kind of lexical variable, but that's
a separate topic ....
best
Robert Dodier