Mathics 5.0 upgrade

[rocky]

This now about does it. There are a couple of get_string_value's still in there in those places where we haven't ensured that we are working with String.

There was a time long long ago when you will see one of the maintainers proding contributors not to use .value and use the (more awkward) get_xxx_value().

That was then and this is now. The reason we use .value is for a couple of reasons. It is not just an artistic kind of thing, but this is actually the convention that many interpreters use. And part of it is that if you have some Object (or boxed, or wrapped) form of a primitive data type and you want the underlying primitive data, it isn't desired to make those look different: so i.value and s.value instead of i.get_int_value() and s.get_string_value(). If somehow you are upset about the accessor not reflecting the type (which in other interpreters is considered a good thing), then the way you get that back is via type annotations, not method naming.

Perhaps in the days before type annotations a better argument could be made. But again, that was then, and this is now.