On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 10:49 AM, David Billinghurst <dbmaxima at gmail.com>wrote:
> I am struggling to understand the relationship between lisp and maxima
> properties on functions.
>
There is no *direct* relationship. The function $properties (with its
helper function properties) tries to pull together the various kinds of
Maxima properties of a symbol from wherever they live into a single list.
Its code is probably the best answer to your question. There is no
simple, direct relationship between the Lisp property list (symbol-plist)
and the various Maxima property lists ($get/$put, $declare, etc.). The
properties reported on by $properties are not settable in any uniform way.
With some work, you could probably tease out the stratigraphy of the
creation of these various systems, but it might be more useful to focus on
the specific problem you are trying to solve.
-s