OOP in Mathematica
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg37570] OOP in Mathematica
- From: Andrzej Kozlowski <andrzej at tuins.ac.jp>
- Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2002 05:00:56 -0500 (EST)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Various have people have sent interesting examples of OO programming in Mathematica, as a proof that "it can be done". However, let me clarify one possible confusion: I for one have never doubted that "it can be done". (In fact I have occasionally tried it myself). The more doubtful issue is "is it worth doing?", or "is it really the best way to program in Mathematica?". I can imagine that OOP may be useful for dealing with large structures and there may be (as I have been told) some performance advantages in introducing some OOP into Mathemaitca. But none the examples I have seen here seems to me to gain much from pseudo-OOP, which is in fact also the trouble with Maeder's package. I have seen a couple fairly large project written using it (one is the Object-Oriented Graph Theory in Chapter III of Grey's "Mastering Mathematica"), but all of them can be programmed with no more effort using the natural Mathematica "functional-pattern based" style. Andrzej Kozlowski