Avoid using EvalString

[fingolfin]

I just noticed that Semigroups (ab)uses EvalString quite a bit (I found 51 hits with grep). This is a function I'd recommend to never use, except for interactive debugging.

One place it is used in Semigroups is this:

for _IsXSemigroup in ["IsFpSemigroup",
                     "IsFpMonoid",
                     "IsNTPMatrixSemigroup",
                     "IsMaxPlusMatrixSemigroup",
                     "IsMinPlusMatrixSemigroup",
                     "IsTropicalMaxPlusMatrixSemigroup",
                     "IsTropicalMinPlusMatrixSemigroup",
                     "IsProjectiveMaxPlusMatrixSemigroup",
                     "IsIntegerMatrixSemigroup",
                     "IsReesMatrixSemigroup",
                     "IsReesZeroMatrixSemigroup"] do
  InstallMethod(TrivialSemigroupCons,
  Concatenation("for ", _IsXSemigroup, " and an integer"),
  [EvalString(_IsXSemigroup), IsInt],
  function(filter, deg)
    local n;
    n := Maximum(deg, 1);
    return AsSemigroup(filter,
                       TrivialSemigroupCons(IsTransformationSemigroup, deg));
  end);
od;

Here, a much better replacement is to use ValueGlobal(_IsXSemigroup). It should even be faster.

Another case is gap/tools/utils.gi, which does EvalString(Concatenation("IsBound(", name, ")")) . I suspect that there, you can get aways with using IsBoundGlobal(name) instead.

This leaves the tests, where your use of EvalString seems OK.

[james-d-mitchell]

Thanks @fingolfin will fix this as soon as I am able.

[james-d-mitchell]

This is resolved via PR #464. Thanks for pointing this out @fingolfin