on "Some Elements of Mathematica Design" by Stephen Wolfram
- To: sw at uunet.UU.NET
- Subject: on "Some Elements of Mathematica Design" by Stephen Wolfram
- From: msdrl!nachbar at uunet.UU.NET (Dr. Robert B. Nachbar)
- Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 11:33:22 EDT
- Cc: mathgroup at uunet.UU.NET (Mathematica mailing list)
I have just read your article in the commentary column of the recent issue of Mathematica Journal, and certainly do understand the design issues you discuss as I have been involved with system design and user interface design for molecular modeling programs here at Merck. Because I have begun to write some of my own packages for Mathematica, I have also had to consider design issues in this context. In particular, a little over half way through your article you cover "... designing a function that will use a sequence of data points," which I recently had to deal with, and agree completely with your remarks from a theoretical point of view. However, from a practical standpoint, you (and your developers) have solved this problem, but the solution is not generally available (at least I haven't come across it in your book), and you did not provide example code in your article or the electronic supplement. Life is too short to reinvent the wheel, especially one so fundemental as this one. What's to be done? Version 2.2 could include some developers' tools to support these design priciples, but that's many months away. In the shorter term, while perusing the package Statistics`LinearRegression`, I came across the function GetData that does just what you describe user written functions should do! Can I pirate this small piece of code? I suspect not because the header lines of the file contain: (*:Legal: Copyright (c) 1990, Wolfram Research, Inc. *) So close, yet so far! I welcome your response, and if you will permit, I'll forward it to the MathGroup mailing list. Respectfully yours, Bob Nachbar -- Dr. Robert B. Nachbar nachbar at msdrl.com Merck Research Laboratories, R50S-100 PO Box 2000 Rahway, NJ 07065 908/594-7795, FAX 908/594-4224