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Re: Re: Re: Any Mathematica 6 book yet?

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg81663] Re: [mg81623] Re: Re: Any Mathematica 6 book yet?
• From: Clifford Martin <camartin at snet.net>
• Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2007 04:42:12 -0400 (EDT)

I must agree about the debugger. I was very excited by the release of Workbench 1.0 because of the promise of a good debugger. I even took a course on it. The reality is that Workbench is so hard to use ( I can't bring in my old code and debug changes- it just doesn't work) that I never use it. So I'm back to using Print statements again. I love Mathematica but would love to have an easy to use debugger with break points, etc. Oh well.

Cliff


Nasser Abbasi <nma at 12000.org> wrote: 
"Murray Eisenberg"  wrote in message 
news:fdf236$20u$1 at smc.vnet.net...

>
> I sometimes find it utterly amazing how deeply some mathematicians,
> scientists, or engineers believe that Mathematica is deficient in being
> handle this or that kind of problem (typically said about numerics, but
> sometime about graphics, too).
>

There are few things that would make Matematica 'easier' to use by those 
engineers who are so used to that 'other' tool (which we all know what it 
is).  I am amazed that WRI still have not added such features after all 
these years. Some of these things are:

1. Ability to zoom in and out of any part of a plot using the mouse. (I know 
this can now be programmed using the new Dynamic features, but this needs to 
be a build-in feature, just like the ability not to rotate 3D plots using a 
mouse).

2. an EASY to use debugger. Something as basic as seeing line numbers and 
setting a break point on a line number.  The current debugger is completely 
useless for me, I can't ever figure how to use it. So I still debug my code 
using Print[].  Using the 'other' system, never had to do this.

3. To Make Mathematica more attractive to 'engineers', add more control 
systems functions to basic Mathematica. May be combine the functions in the 
control systems application and the functions in the image processing 
application into Mathemtica core. WRI might lose few bucks in sales from 
those applications, but will gain thousands more in sales of Mathematica 
itself (adding $5 to the price of Mathematica itself might end up balancing 
things out).

I can make a much much bigger list, but we can just start with the above for 
now.

Nasser