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Re: precedence for ReplaceAll?

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg110640] Re: precedence for ReplaceAll?
  • From: AES <siegman at stanford.edu>
  • Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:49:25 -0400 (EDT)
  • References: <i0cjk9$88h$1@smc.vnet.net>

In article <i0cjk9$88h$1 at smc.vnet.net>,
 Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> I am not sure what outcome you are looking for here.

Something like the following:

*  Wolfram identifies, from user test panels that they set up, or from 
monitoring particularly frequent queries or complaints in user forums 
like this one, those "gotchas" in Mathematica that are particularly 
likely to be encountered by novice or unsophisticated or unsuspecting 
users, or particularly likely to cause serious damage.  

("Particularly frequent" might be defined as the top 1% of all such 
encounters.)

*  And Wolfram then attempts to forestall these damaging encounters, or 
attempts to assist users in recovering from them as quickly as possible, 
by, as appropriate:

--Adding brief warnings about those specific gotchas in prominent 
locations in the ref/ or elementary tutorial/ documentation that one 
would go to if one encountered such a gotcha.  

("Prominent location" is operationally described as "On the first screen 
that opens when you go to this documentation".)

--Or, adding a small number of user-enable-able or disable-able warning 
flags that will be displayed if the user issues a command that may raise 
one of these gotchas.

Mathematica has, what, about 5000 commands in its vocabulary?  Maybe 50 
of those commands account for 90% of the gotchas that occur?  Adding 
maybe 50 such warnings or warning flags wouldn't be a good idea?


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