Re: Thinking Mathematica: Any suggestions?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg91706] Re: Thinking Mathematica: Any suggestions?
- From: David Bailey <dave at Remove_Thisdbailey.co.uk>
- Date: Sat, 6 Sep 2008 02:06:13 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <200809031046.GAA00914@smc.vnet.net> <g9r4dg$cvq$1@smc.vnet.net>
Tyler Hayes wrote: > Thanks everyone for your comments. In my mind, the difficulties that I > have (and perhaps others) is that I am accustomed to "seeing" > explicitly the indices being manipulated. As such, when programming in > Mathematica and using indexed values is more or less obviated by > things such as Map, Apply, etc., keeping track sometimes becomes lost. > > Having said that, I am becoming more comfortable with Mathematica's > approach, albeit slowly, and I suspect that with more practice it will > sort itself out in the end. > > Cheers, > > t. I know I will get flamed for saying this, but unless you will need high performance - not every Mathematica problem requires a lot of CPU - you may be best to start programming in a procedural way, and gradually start to learn functional programming later when you are more comfortable with Mathematica syntax. You may have noticed that FORTRAN whole array operations execute little if any faster than an explicit DO loop. The differance with Mathematica is that because of the high level nature of Mathematica, there is an overhead associated with the execution of each step. Functional programming gains because it does a lot for very few individual steps. David Bailey http://www.dbaileyconsultancy.co.uk
- References:
- Thinking Mathematica: Any suggestions?
- From: Tyler <hayes.tyler@gmail.com>
- Thinking Mathematica: Any suggestions?