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Re: Wolfram User Interface Research?

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg87987] Re: Wolfram User Interface Research?
  • From: Will Robertson <wspr81 at gmail.com>
  • Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:51:15 -0400 (EDT)
  • References: <fuhfdc$ihb$1@smc.vnet.net>

On 2008-04-21 16:53:24 +0930, AES <siegman at stanford.edu> said:

> If one examined a bunch of notebooks generated by some representative
> set of users, I particularly wonder what would be the relative frequenc=
y
> of use for all of the numerous non-alphabetic operators in Mathematica?
> -- that is, all the innumerable codings like  \.   \\.   \@   ->   &   =
@
> @@   @@@   \*   <<   %  and on.

When I started learning Mathematica, I was a little confused about how
to start with all of these. I really liked the conciseness they give to
expressions, but it can be tempting to chain inscrutiably long commands
together and create an unreadable mess --- but of course, if you did
exactly the same thing with the FullForm equivalents then the result
would be just as hard to read, if not more so.

One of the biggest things I've noticed is that I like using @ a lot
more than I thought I would. At first, I thought that consistency would
be better and everything should be nested brackets:
  Sort[Flatten[OptionValue[myopt]]]
or whatever. But
  Sort@Flatten@OptionValue@myopt
is much easier to type and removes the need to count brackets.

And I've loved being able to tack on a //N (or whatever) to the end of
expressions from the first time I saw Mathematica's postfix notation.

Just a couple of thoughts :)
Will



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