Pipes Inside Mathematica?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg45659] Pipes Inside Mathematica?
- From: Harold.Noffke at wpafb.af.mil (Harold Noffke)
- Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 19:58:45 -0500 (EST)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
MathGroup: I think Mathematica would be a better programming language if it had a construct that allowed pipes (like Unix does). The //-mark comes close to facilitating this, but Mathematica needs a placeholder to denote "result from preceding //-mark". Here's a short example to illustrate what would be gained. In[1]:= m = 5*Pi // IntegerPart Out[1]= 15 In[2]:= n = 13*E // IntegerPart Out[2]= 35 In[3]:= Table[0, {m}, {n}] // MatrixForm Out[3]//MatrixForm= 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 > > 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 : : : : : : 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 > 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 What we would really like to write is the preceding computation as a pipeline, so that it looks something like this ... {{5*Pi},{13*E}} // IntegerPart // Table[0, Extract[<?>,1], Extract[<?>,2]] // MatrixForm The <?> symbol means, "I don't know what to put here" -- it's a placeholder for whatever Mathematica wants to use as "result from preceding //-mark". Maybe @ would make a good placeholder here, and what we would see on screen is ... {{5*Pi},{13*E}} // IntegerPart // Table[0, Extract[@,1], Extract[@,2]] // MatrixForm I think Mathematica will be a better programming language if it adopts some sort of pipe convention. Harold