On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 22:34:46 -0800, Xah Lee wrote: > while what you said is true, but the problem is that 99.99% of > programers do NOT know this. They do not know Mathematica. They've never > seen a
Could you please offer some evidence to support this claim? Most of the programmers I've ever run into, were quite familiar with the notion that many aspects of their languages were artifacts of hardware limitations. You don't need Mathematica to figure out that (10.0 * 0.1) - 1.0 doesn't often equal 0.0. The moment you try such comparisons with floats, you figure it out. Oh, granted - the *first* time you try it, you might spend days trying to understand what's wrong. But having done that, you will never, ever fail to understand about the evils of computer engineering. Anyway, most programmers probably get burned like this early on, if they forget that numeric representations in most languages are inaccurate. They don't need Mathematica to help them understand. BTW, for those who don't have access to Mathematica, I highly recommend sagemath. I have no way of making a comparison between the two (I have no access to Mathematica), but sagemath is mature, useful, and fast. -- You will be singled out for promotion in your work. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
