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Re: OO in Mathematica

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg37479] Re: [mg37458] OO in Mathematica
  • From: Andrzej Kozlowski <andrzej at tuins.ac.jp>
  • Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2002 01:42:52 -0500 (EST)
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

On Thursday, October 31, 2002, at 10:59 PM, Hermann Schmitt wrote:

> My point is, that Mathematica is not based on functional programming.
> Mathematica is essentially a set of instructions, which can be 
> structured
> into programs in several ways.

This seems to me a vacuous statement, or rather one that can be made 
about any complete programming language. Certainly you can write in 
Mathematica an interpretor for any other programming language, so in 
that sense you can also  structure your programs in any way you like. 
But Mathematica has its own natural language any there is hardly anyone 
who doubts that it is based on a mixture of Lisp-like functional 
programming and Prolog-like  "logic programming". As for OOP, as you 
say: "pre-requsites are missing". They are missing presumably because 
people at WRI do not think they would make a tremendous  addition to 
Mathematica's capabilities. I also share this view, which does not mean 
that less than world shattering addition  would not be interesting and 
useful.


Andrzej Kozlowski
Yokohama, Japan
http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~akoz/
http://platon.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/andrzej/



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