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Re: Return in function

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg105682] Re: Return in function
  • From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
  • Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:27:06 -0500 (EST)

On 12/14/09 at 12:04 AM, nma at 12000.org (Nasser M. Abbasi) wrote:

>"David Bailey" <dave at removedbailey.co.uk> wrote in message
>news:hg2d7s$j8a$1 at smc.vnet.net...

>>Aren't you being a bit unfair, Daniel has obviously taken time to
>>thin out this example from whatever complicated context he found it
>>in originally - minimal examples of problems often don't make
>>sense:)

>Not only that, but if someone can write code in any language such as
>the output is "unpredictable" then there is something really wrong
>in this picture.

>No one should be able to write code in a well defined language such
>that the output becomes "unpredictable". We are not dealing with the
>heisenberg uncertainty principle here. May be the code is hard to
>understand, ok, but "unpredictable"?

You are being way over simplistic here. Any general purpose
programming language includes the capability of making arbitrary
edits to existing files. That implicitly means I can always
generate code which will cause unpredictable results.

=46urther, a design goal of Mathematica appears to be the ability
to do anything that is possible in Mathematics. Given that goal
and Godel's theorem, it will always be possible to generated
code which has unpredictable results.



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