Re: Compatibility woes
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg76052] Re: Compatibility woes
- From: Bhuvanesh <lalu_bhatt at yahoo.com>
- Date: Tue, 15 May 2007 05:00:16 -0400 (EDT)
I can comment only on the things that I'm (somewhat peripherally) involved with.
Random[] had several issues, which you can find easily by browsing MathGroup. It was clear that a better and hopefully extensible random number generator was needed. However, the behavior of Random[] could not change, for backward compatibility, so the choices were to either have a method option for Random[] (with default Method->"Legacy") or one or more different functions; the latter approach was chosen to make it clear that this was a new implementation, and Random[] was left as-is.
I can't reproduce the issue with loading the Developer` package:
In[1]:= Get["Developer`"]
In[2]:= PackedArrayQ[Range[10]]
Out[2]= True
In[3]:= PackedArrayQ[Table[i, {i,10}]]
Out[3]= False
In[4]:= PackedArrayQ[ToPackedArray[Table[i, {i,10}]]]
Out[4]= True
In any case, you don't really need to load the package; you can use the symbols in contexted form, as in Developer`ToPackedArray[array].
Bhuvanesh,
Wolfram Research