Few notes
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg53962] Few notes
- From: bearophileHUGS at lycos.com
- Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2005 03:15:45 -0500 (EST)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
This is probably my first post in this interesting newsgroup. I like Mathematica (mostly as a programming/prototyping/visualising tool) for its consistency, for all the builtin goodies, and for its graphics capabilities. I also love Python (and other things/languages), and I think there are important similarities between Mathematica (M.) and Python... I'm a kind of newbie in M., but there are few things in it that I don't like much, that I think they can be improved: - The built-in M. editor is good to write formulas, to see graphics, etc, but it's far from good to insert small programs... And it's even worse for a programs a little bigger (for them I use a simple text external editor). A simple text editor is often better for me, than the builtin one. Adding colours (and few other simple "modern" programming aids) looks useful to me: http://www.mma-users.org/mediawiki/index.php/Wish_list Such colours are quite useful during programming. - I usually use M. on a Windows system. In all windows programs after the selection of a piece of text the user can move the cursor, to increase or decrease the selected part. Mathematica frontend is the only program that I know of, that allows only to increase that size (even using the back cursor key). I don't know why this design choice was adopted, maybe for uniformity across different implementations of the M. frontend on different operating systems, but I think this isn't enough. On a Win/Mac/etc there are interaction/GUI conventions that all programs must respect. - For Python there is a 2D plotting library (with some nice data processing capabilities inspired by): http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html Its much simpler (and probably quite worse) than the normal good M. graphical capabilities, but the graphics it produces is very smooth (anti-aliased), because it comes from the very fast, very good (and free) AGG library: http://www.antigrain.com/ http://www.antigrain.com/demo/index.html In my old version of M. graphics isn't anti-aliased, is this a design choice? Do new M. versions produce antialeased graphics? Thank you, bear hugs, Bearophile