Question: on setting _EnvTry to 'hard'

For the function coulditbe it says

The environment variable _EnvTry can be used to specify the intensity of the testing by the is and coulditbe routines. Currently _EnvTry can be set to normal (the default) or hard. If _EnvTry is set to hard, is and coulditbe calls can take exponential time.

But how does one know the current value of _EnvTry which is supposed to be set to normal.? If I do   _EnvTry it does not show any value.  And when I do 

anames('environment');
anames('environment','active');

I do not see _EnvTry even listed.  I wanted to make sure I am setting it correctly.

Is it enough to do this?

foo:=proc()
 _EnvTry:='hard';
  #now use coulditbe, it should use hard value?
  #coulditbe(....)
end proc;

foo();

Would the above actually tell coulditbe to try hard? I wanted to use this inside a proc without affecting any global setting it might have. It is not possible to tell by just calling it if it actually using the hard option or not.

I do not think I am setting this right, I just tried

foo:=proc()
 _EnvTry:='hard';
 _EnvTry:='XXXX';
  #now use coulditbe, it should use hard value?
  coulditbe(1=2)
end proc;

And it did not complain or anything. Any value I put seems to work. I must be not setting this correctly as coulditbe does not complain.

I wish help would give example usages. But Maple help is not good at all as it has no usage examples to help users.

btw, I think the use of environment variables is bad in programming.

Each function should instead accept options as argument and one should set an option explictly.  So coulditbe should have an explicit optional argument to pass it. This makes the code more clear when looking at the call also.

Programming environment variables are just like global variables.

Bad way to program as in large program one can lose track of these settings.