Look at the following two sequences of two commands. They are the same up to the choice of variable a or z, but the version with a produces an error whereas the function with z does not. First run (after a restart of maxima):
declare(a,constant); polynomialp(x^2+x+1/a,[x]);
Now replace a by z and there is no error when run (after a restart of maxima):
declare(z,constant); polynomialp(x^2+x+1/z,[x]);
The error reported in the case with variable a is:
define: in definition of dotproduct, found bad argument a
-- an error. To debug this try: debugmode(true);
Strangely enough, after running the second command of the first sequence again, the error does not recur.
Above code was run on Maxima versions 5.30 and 5.39.
