On Sep 5, 2:40 pm, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > On 5 September 2010 22:13, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Sunday, September 5, 2010, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote: > >> RJF thinks Lisp is the best language > >> William thinks Python is God > > > No I don't. > > > I chose Python for Sage because in 2004 it was the closest popular > > open source language to Magma. > > God was the wrong word. But you have said Python is a beautiful > language. Your view of the language contrasts greatly with that of > RJF. > > It's not clear to me the best way to tackle something able to parse > Mathematica. > > It is however very clear there are far more people know Python than > Lisp, so use of Python is more attractive to more developers. > > Dave
More people know C than Python. More people use Windows than Linux. More people have IQs below 110 than above 110. There are many reasons to favor lisp for writing a parser for Mathematica, but one that is hard to deny is that it is already available free. There is, by the way, another way to parse Mathematica, if you have a whole bunch of stuff you want to convert to (say) lisp. You read it in to Mathematica and print it out in FullForm, or run a 3-line program (in Mathematica) to print it out in lisp in the first place. This would work for, say Rubi. I think Python is better than many other languages for some purposes, and not better for some others. I think we already had this discussion. RJF -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
