Question: How to evaluate a table within a package module.

Glyph2.maple

The above link is a maple workbook containing the package Glyph2 together with the install script and two worksheets illustrating the difficulty I am having with the code in the procedure assignaltbasis (near the end of the code in Glyph2.mpl).

The problematic code is shown standalone is basisdemo worksheet, but reproduced below for reference. Interestingly, even though the table should be evaluated in a seq command, outside the module it works without eval. Inside the module evaluation does not make any difference.

indxs := [1, 2, 3, 4];
altbasis := [seq(seq(e[i[]], i = combinat:-choose(indxs, 2*k)), k = 1 .. 2)];
gen := table([seq(op(gen[i]) = bivec[i], i = 1 .. nops(gen))]);
exprs := [seq(exteriorp(seq(gen[op(2*i - 1 .. 2*i, b)], i = 1 .. nops(b)/2)), b = altbasis)];

The worksheet Basischangedemo shows how the exported procedure “assignaltbasis” is used in the module and the error that results if a bivector basis is used. From experimentation I have found that the error results because “assignaltbasis” passes the table name to the procedure “exteriorp” instead of the bivectors that should have resulted from evaluation of the table. Including the eval command within the seq procedure does not make any difference to the result. I am unclear whether this is a problem with evaluation of the table or a problem that results from namespace conflict.

I have a further namespace problem with the local variables, AltRoot, AltToStd, and StdToAlt which store the results from assignaltbasis.  If I declare these variables as exports, I get an error message “attempt to assign to a protected variable”. Therefore I added an exported procedure “ShowAltBasis” to display the results.  As you can see, this procedure produces the fully-qualified names of each blade making the result difficult to read. I would prefer to get rid of the “Glyph2:-” qualification.

The waters are muddied even further because the other worksheet, “basisdemo”, contains the core code extracted from assignaltbasis showing that the code using the table actually works (outside the module). From this I conclude that a namespace conflict exists within the module, preventing the table from fully evaluating.

My understanding is that within the module local and exported names are more or less equivalent, so I am puzzled why local and exported names in assignaltbasis are so problematic.

I would appreciate any advice about these issues. Clearly my understanding of maple’s namespaces is incomplete.