Symbolics- Expression changing behaviour after println()

General Usage
1

Hi,

I have observed some very strange behaviour using Symbolics.jl that I’m trying to understand. The behaviour of expressions in a dictionary, one which I might pass to Symbolics.substitute(), changes after I println() the dictionary. I have created a MWE that demonstrates the behaviour that is loosely based on my desired application (Reynolds decomposition of state variables):

using Symbolics

function ReynoldsDecompose(StateVars)
    DecompDict = Dict()
    for Var = StateVars
        SymRep = Symbolics.tosymbol(Var, escape = false)
        # Generate variables for the mean and disturbance parts
        DecompVars = eval(Meta.parse("@variables $(SymRep)_m $(SymRep)_p"))
        DecompDict[Var] = (DecompVars[1] + DecompVars[2]).val
    end
    return DecompDict()
end

function InspectRDDict(ReynoldsDecompDict)
    for key = keys(ReynoldsDecompDict)
        println(ReynoldsDecompDict[key].arguments)    # Any[]
        println(ReynoldsDecompDict[key])              # $key_m + $key_p
        println(ReynoldsDecompDict[key].arguments)    # Any[$key_m, $key_p]
    end
end

@variables u v
InspectRDDict(ReynoldsDecompose([u, v]))

The act of printing the value seems to change the value, which sounds absurd so I must be missing something here. I suspect I am not understanding the scoping of Symbolics variables, because the same does not occur if I execute the for loop within the global scope, rather than in the function scope.

Can anyone explain what exactly I’m missing here?