Re: Mathematica daily WTF
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg115061] Re: Mathematica daily WTF
- From: kj <no.email at please.post>
- Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2010 04:09:06 -0500 (EST)
- References: <ifcnhn$bai$1@smc.vnet.net> <iff45b$r5s$1@smc.vnet.net>
In <iff45b$r5s$1 at smc.vnet.net> David Bailey <dave at removedbailey.co.uk> writes: >I can't see why programmers would assume that the attributes of a symbol >would, or would not, get copied with an assignment, because languages >like C++ or Fortran don't have any equivalent of attributes. LISP does >have property lists, and as far as I can remember, these also don't get >copied with assignment. OK, perhaps I omitted a step in my argument. Let me clarify. Mathematica's notion of, and notation for, a symbol's multiple "associated values" inverts the one that has become commonplace in mainstream programming through the the object-oriented model: in this view, instead of writing Attributes[symbol] Messages[symbol] DownValues[symbol] Options[symbol] etc. one would write symbol.attributes symbol.messages symbol.downvalues symbol.options etc. IOW, what Mathematica calls a symbol's various associated values, in OOP become "encapsulated" as properties (or slots/methods/attributes, etc) of the "symbol object". (BTW, there's a similar syntactic inversion in R, so instead of writing list.names one writes names(list).) In the OOP view, "cloning a symbol object" would mean copying all its properties. Hence, coming from an OOP background, it is surprising to me that writing "B = A" in Mathematica does not copy all of attributes of A to B. Yes, even in OOP languages it can be the case that assignment results in shallow copying, as opposed to deep copying. But Mathematica's assignment does not produce even a shallow copy. ~kj