MathGroup Archive 2002

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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



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