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Re: Opinions about the "Oneliners"

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg40345] Re: [mg40315] Opinions about the "Oneliners"
  • From: Gerry Flanagan <flanagan at materials-sciences.com>
  • Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2003 04:36:05 -0500 (EST)
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Actually, this is a pretty serious problem. We've been trying to make 
Mathematica a standard language for our engineering firm, but I've 
struggled for years with developing good documentation standards. The 
problem is that I have a couple of people that can program in Mathematica style - 
very compact functional form, but the people that don't use Mathematica everyday 
can never parse how the functions work. I'm a big fan of using typography 
(indenting and other visual aids) in programming, but Mathematica makes even those 
methods difficult. I'm tempted to ban prefix and postfix notation in 
packages because they can make for very opaque code. Many years ago, 
Wolfram produced a document with some programming standards. Things like 
user defined functions start with lower case, built-in functions start with 
upper case. Have there been other attempts to standardize and clarify? I'm 
familiar for Roman Maeder's two books, but still looking for more ideas.
Gerry Flanagan


At 04:01 AM 3/31/2003 -0500, Oliver Friedrich wrote:
>Hallo dear community,
>
>I don't know whether this topic has been discussed ever since before.
>
>I like those socalled "Oneliners" to solve this or that problem. It shows
>up, how elegant and effective the Mathematica language can be.
>
>But to be honest: Isn't it a torture trying to understand the "how does it
>work" of a oneliner written by some else?
>
>Is it useful to use //TreeForm to visualize the inner structure of a
>oneliner (where is the "inner beginning")
>
>The vast majority of oneliners presented here lack on comments. Despite of
>the wonderful constructs, is this good programming style?
>
>I'm looking forward to the next oneliner !
>
>Oliver Friedrich



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