On 7/11/2011 11:37 PM, Xah Lee wrote:
it's funny, in all these supposedly modern high-level langs, they
don't provide even simple list manipulation functions such as union,
intersection, and the like. Not in perl, not in python,
Union and intersection are set operations, not list operations. Python
has had a set type with a full set of set operations for several years.
It has list concatenation, which is the list equivalent of union. It has
lots of other useful list operations.
> Mathematica has Union, Intersection, and a host of others
> some 20 years ago, and today it has a complete set of combinatorics
> functions as *builtin* functions
Python has the basic combinatoric function in the itertools module,
though they are not used much. If Mathematica has Catalan sequences
builtin, I wonder how much they are used. Since Python is free, in both
meanings, it does not have paid people sitting around writing things to
pad numbers to justify a $2k price tag. On the other hand, lots of
people have added and made available lots of good add-ons. Mathematica
should probably be most fairly compared with Python+numpy+scipy and
maybe a few other things.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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