Re: Mathematica frustrations...
- To: mathgroup@smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg11806] Re: Mathematica frustrations...
- From: "P.J. Hinton" <paulh@wolfram.com>
- Date: Tue, 31 Mar 1998 02:28:26 -0500
- Organization: Wolfram Research, Inc.
- References: <6cgf9k$sd7@smc.vnet.net> <6d0ah6$2jt@smc.vnet.net> <6esgci$5mf@smc.vnet.net> <199803222313.QAA12069@mars.Colorado.EDU> <6fd2dj$5ut@smc.vnet.net> <6fi6k9$4qe@smc.vnet.net>
On 28 Mar 1998, Tom Marchioro wrote: > Selwyn Hollis wrote in message <6fd2dj$5ut@smc.vnet.net>... > > <snip> > > >How about this for Version 4.0: globals/internals begin with % instead > >of $, and $ replaces cntrl-( and cntrl-) for beginning and ending "math > >mode" (as in TeX). What the hell, why not just use TeX syntax? I doubt > >that Professor Knuth would mind. And it would sure make a lot of > >Mathematica users' lives a lot simpler! > > > Ha ha ha ha! That's a good one! It will never happen, because it just > makes too much sense :) > > Seriously, I do not know of a software company that faced with the > choice between doing something "logical" and doing something that makes > old versions of their own software supported transparently would not > choose the latter. Mathematica is not modeled on TeX, and I'm guessing > never will be. > > We can only hope that the Notebook -> TeX and TeX -> Notebook converters > are eventually good enough to make things tolerable. I doubt that dollar signs will be replaced by any other character for denoting global session variables. It would break too much existing top level code that depend on using these variables. The use of dollar signs makes sense if you're a Unix user. It's used in shell scripts to denote "the value of" of a variable. My own limited experiences with perl indicate that a similar convention is used there, too. To be fair, Mathematica does understand TeX aliases for a number of special characters. If Esc-a-Esc is too counterintuitive for you, you can always use Esc-\alpha-Esc to generate a lowercase alpha. If you are encountering troubles with TeXSave (notebook to TeX conversion -- Mathematica 3.0 has no means of converting TeX back into notebooks), I would encourage you to send a description of your troubles to Technical Support (support@wolfram.com). They may be able to give you some guidance as to how to get better results. -- P.J. Hinton Mathematica Programming Group paulh@wolfram.com Wolfram Research, Inc. http://www.wolfram.com/~paulh/ Disclaimer: Opinions expressed herein are those of the author alone.