Jaap Spies wrote: > Jason Grout wrote: >> Alex Ghitza wrote: >>> On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 2:03 PM, Jason Grout >>> <jason-s...@creativetrax.com <mailto:jason-s...@creativetrax.com>> wrote: >>> >>> >>> seber...@spawar.navy.mil <mailto:seber...@spawar.navy.mil> wrote: >>> > Carl >>> > >>> > Mathematica seems to have been successful with this approach. I'm >>> > curious what were the reasons for its disapproval. Perhaps it was >>> > feared it was error prone? >>> >>> >>> Along with the other reasons people are giving, it may be helpful to >>> remember that it is may be less error-prone in MMA. For example, >>> parentheses in Sage can denote function calling as well as grouping, >>> while they only denote grouping in MMA. With implicit multiplication, >>> func (x) and func(x) are both valid in Sage, but have different >>> meanings. In MMA, they both are multiplication, like you'd expect from >>> math. >>> >>> >>> ??? so you're saying that in Mathematica sin(x) means sin times x? >>> That's not what I'd expect from math... >>> >>> I must be misreading what you wrote. >>> >> Nope, you're correct. That's a nice thing about Mathematica. Function >> calls are always with square brackets, parentheses are purely a grouping >> construct. Curly braces are always lists, and double square brackets >> are indexing (but that's just syntactical sugar). System functions >> always use camel-case. I really like the consistency in mathematica; it >> makes it easy to learn and predictable. >> > > Nevertheless I *hate* the Mathematica syntax! > > See my rant from long ago: Why Mathematica is not my language of choice! > > An example from the OEIS I happened to see today: > > %t A055254 A055254[N_] := Count[ #, True] & /@ Map[OddQ, IntegerDigits /@ > (2^# & > /@ Range[N])] (This generates a table of the number of odd > digits > in the first N powers of two.) - Douglas Skinner > (skinnerd(AT)comcast.net), > Dec 06 2007 > > (how easy to learn and remember) versus > > %o A055254 (PARI) > a(n)=sum(k=1,ceil(log(2^n+1)/log(10)),floor(2^n/10^(k-1))%2) (Benoit > Cloitre, Feb 10 2006) > > Not to speak how easy it will look in pure sage!
Don't get me wrong; I much prefer the Sage code I've written over the Mathematica code I've written. Long ago, I found that Sage made it easy to write clear code, while Mathematica made it easy to write quick, but incomprehensible code. If I knew perl, I might draw an analogy here :). My point was that once you learn a few simple rules, things are nice and consistent (or at least the *can* be nice and consistent). Part of the problem with MMA is that there is lots and lots of syntactic sugar, so if you use it, you have to remember a lot of (admittedly consistent) rules to be able to even parse a sentence. It was easy to get to the point that I was writing code using this syntactic sugar, and there were so many rules that I could never seem to keep them all in my head, even if I wrote the code. Jason --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
