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Re: More /.{I->-1} craziness

Andrzej Kozlowski wrote:
> The obvious argument against doing this is that there is no evidence at 
> all that there is a demand would actually justify any effort in this 
> direction.

1. It is interesting that a response to this message from DrMajorBob 
appears in my newsreader approximately one minutes before the message 
itself.  So either AK and DMB either have early access to the newgroup
or (more probably) are corresponding separately.

2. If you wishes to characterize complaints on the newsgroup as "no 
evidence at all"  then quite a few suggestions should be ignored.

> 
> So far I have noticed just two voices in favor, the person who once 
> wrote a Mathematica parser that has never been used by anyone (as far as 
> I can tell),

Talking about "no evidence".  What could I hypothesize about you, based 
on no evidence? I'm afraid SteveC would (correctly) censor it!

For your information, the lisp program MockMMA  (are we allowed to 
mention this here??) has been used by a few people for system building 
projects of various sorts. From a Google search, a note back in 2001 says
"It's used in Tilu   http://torte.cs.berkeley.edu:8010/tilu .
There are about 40 people who have downloaded copies and told
me they did so; one person apparently used it as the basis for
an NSF small business grant".
{Tilu, after running about 250,000 queries, over a few years, was shut 
down.}




> you and that seems to be all. Even the OP, after his post 
> was answer, did not, as far as I can tell, support the idea of adding 
> new facilities to Mathematica so that he would not need to learn about 
> FullForm.

As far as YOU can tell.

> On the other hand, I have seen quite many people writing that they see 
> no need for anything of this kind (I am not adding myself to their 
> number).

Many? Really? On the other hand, you are not counting the ones who wrote 
to me off the newsgroup, in favor of the idea.
> 
> Obviously no well run company would ever embark on spending resources on 
> something that may end up being never (or almost never) used.

I did not know that you were an expert on business practices. Would you 
therefore recommend that airlines stop carrying lifeboats on Boeing 
747s? They've almost never been used (perhaps never? I think crashes 
into deep ocean water result in 100% fatalities).
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