Re: A Package Function Tutorial
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg92246] Re: [mg92228] A Package Function Tutorial
- From: "Mauricio Esteban Cuak" <cuak2000 at gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 03:31:23 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <200809231135.HAA00876@smc.vnet.net>
Just a small comment that probably only adresses beginners like me: While a function with all the bells and whistles can have a lot of good things, I often spend too much time trying to figure out how a function works when i download a package. If it had less of all that nice stuff, I could understand how it works and avoid feeding it with the wrong input (instead of not understanding it and having the function tell me that it's a wrong input) Of course, I am not suggesting people shouldn't write professional looking functions; I'm only saying that sometimes there's a trade-off, at least for beginners like me that are trying to understand how the functions work. cd 2008/9/23 <blackhole at thebushman.net> > I have written a brief introduction to writing package functions that > implement most of the bells and whistles one would associate with a > professionally written function. Some of the topics covered are > implementation of Automatic in functions, overloading of built-in > symbols, and others. > > Yes, most of the material can be found scattered in the shipping > documentation, but my sense is that there is no good place to find > essentially a checklist of the features a good function should have, > like argument checking, attributes, syntax coloring, etc. You will > find that I am no expert, but perhaps someone at Wolfram (or > elsewhere) will be offended enough to contribute some good > suggestions. > > You can find it at my website, http://www.thebushman.net. > > Here you will also find a package I published last month, a NURBS > package providing a bridge from parametric curves and surfaces to CAD- > friendly IGES format. > >
- References:
- A Package Function Tutorial
- From: blackhole@thebushman.net
- A Package Function Tutorial