Strategies to re-engineer someone else's notebook?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg116693] Strategies to re-engineer someone else's notebook?
- From: "W. Craig Carter" <ccarter at mit.edu>
- Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2011 06:22:19 -0500 (EST)
Mathgroup, This is perhaps an odd but practical query, and I am guessing that some of you have tackled similar. Sorry for the lengthy question below. What is a plausible strategy to "improve" a working notebook, where the notebook is written in the way many beginners-to-Mathematica write notebooks? The user that I am helping runs her notebook by changing one variable, evaluating the notebook, killing the kernel, changing another variable, evaluating the notebook.... For a concrete and artificial (hopefully amusing) example that is representative of about 1000 lines of code that probably started its life as a giant spreadsheet: the target notebook to be fixed might look like this (**********) hamburgerMass = proteins + veggies + starch; hamburgerCalories = proteins proteinCalorieDensity + veggies veggieCalorieDensity + starch starchCalorieDensity; meat = 12; lettuce = 8; cheese = 13; pickles = 1; bun = 0.5; proteins = If[CheeseBurger,cheese + meat,meat]; veggies = lettuce + pickles; starch = bun; hamburgerCosts = meat meatCosts + veggies veggieCosts + starch starchCosts (*etc etc. Output from expressions at line 1000 become very long*) (******************) Sometimes the user wishes to know only the number of calories, sometimes a pie chart of calorie contributions, and sometimes things like: = ParametricPlot[{hamburgerMass/.meat->x,hamburgerCalories/.meat->x},{x,0,1}] (*with all other variables assigned*). My current strategy is to leave out any assignments, evaluate the notebook from a fresh kernel, and then find the dependencies of "derived" expressions using a function like this: vars[expr_] := Union[Cases[expr, a_ /; (! NumberQ[a] && AtomQ[a]), Infinity]] which gives all the symbols on which expr depends, and then use these independent variables to construct functions by cutting and pasting. Tedious, but a path towards doing something useful with Manipulate. Another approach may be to make everything a delayed assignment; another would be to make everything Dynamic. Any ideas how I might do this with less tedium and error? Also, if the naive-notebook generator wishes to change a single line, I'd like to be able to re-engineer her notebook without duplicate labor. Thanks, Craig