Re-indexing Mathematica
- To: mathgroup at yoda.physics.unc.edu
- Subject: Re-indexing Mathematica
- From: mcdave at rice.edu (David Tindall McMath)
- Date: Fri, 17 Jul 92 14:16:13 CDT
Mathgroup,
I've just begun trying to convert several weeks' worth of ideas into
Mathematica code, and I found a small problem. I'm working with points in R^k
for several different values of k, and (don't ask me why) I did all my indexing
from 0. That is, a point in R^k is (x_0, ..., x_{k-1}). And I just realized
that Mathematica doesn't quite like this. You see, I'm representing points as
lists. But x[[0]] is "List", not the x_0 that I want. I would REALLY like to
index from 0 in Mathematica, because all these subscripts are buried in all
kinds of summations and sequences and such, and I don't want to have to go
through and re-index everything. I was thinking I could Unprotect[Part] and
muck about with it, but I'm not sure how to do that without getting into
infinite recursion stuff (Part[i_] := Part[i+1] just doesn't make MMA very
happy).
I'm using Mathematica v. 2.0 for SPARC. Thanks for any input you can offer.
David McMath
mcdave at rice.edu