Re: Re: Replace and ReplaceAll -- simple application
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg106005] Re: [mg105982] Re: Replace and ReplaceAll -- simple application
- From: "David Park" <djmpark at comcast.net>
- Date: Wed, 30 Dec 2009 04:13:08 -0500 (EST)
- References: <200912270006.TAA12080@smc.vnet.net> <hh72dp$kud$1@smc.vnet.net> <hh9vfo$1rk$1@smc.vnet.net> <14301726.1262069417572.JavaMail.root@n11>
It would be nice if some of these features could be designed out. Another thing I find inconvenient is the way expressions often Simplify to a form that contains extra minus signs. But perhaps trying to design these things out will just push out problems somewhere else. Nevertheless, I think this is primarily an education problem. Users do not learn the basic use of Mathematica early enough and then they stumble over various features just when they have a serious problem that needs solving. Very frustrating. One skill that students may especially lack is the ability to manipulate expressions in a more detailed form. They may want to do this to obtain a specific textbook form, or just because they prefer a certain form, or because they want to follow a specific solution path. Mathematica is really good at that kind of stuff but learning to do it takes education, time and practice. Just adding extra notes and examples in Help, although useful, is not in itself going to solve the education problem. And it's not fair to students to throw Mathematica at them on difficult material, when they have not really learned how to use it. David Park djmpark at comcast.net http://home.comcast.net/~djmpark/ From: AES [mailto:siegman at stanford.edu] In article <hh9vfo$1rk$1 at smc.vnet.net>, Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote: > Scot T. Martin wrote: > > The problem is that "-1." is not "1". > And furthermore, this bug has been declared a feature. And defended, > repeatedly. Just as I does not occur in -I. > It can be fixed, should be fixed, and has been fixed in other CAS. I'll defer to Richard Fateman (and/or other computer algebra experts) as to whether this general behavior (!! especially with respect to -I !!) is a bug that should be fixed, or a feature. But if it's gonna be considered a feature in Mathematica, I'd strongly suggest that it should be strongly **featured** -- or, if you like, it should be warned about!! -- in the Mathematica documentation, especially at the more elementary levels of documentation, **so that ordinary users can't miss being warned about this unexpected behavior** ^HH^H^H^H sorry, so that they can't miss being warned about "this feature". For example, right after the first line of the Help for I, which says I represents the imaginary unit Sqrt[-1]. there might be a warning line which says WARNING: I is a number and not a symbol. Attempting to replace or reverse the sign of I using a rule, such as expr/.{I->-I) may produce unexpected results if the expr contains -I. (By the way, note the wording above: "I represents", not "I is".) There are a very large number of other places in the Mathematica documentation where emphasized WARNINGs like this would be helpful. (I suppose there could even be optional warning messages that appear any time a cell executes a rule containing a number on the LHS of a ReplaceAll symbol. And, the documentation for ReplaceAll could have an initial WARNING message that it is not just the kind of Global Search and Replace command that many ordinary users, familiar with many other word processing and software apps, might well think it is. )
- References:
- Replace and ReplaceAll -- simple application
- From: amannuc1 <Anthony.J.Mannucci@jpl.nasa.gov>
- Replace and ReplaceAll -- simple application