Re: Tips for writing correct, non trivial Mathematica Libraries
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg124442] Re: Tips for writing correct, non trivial Mathematica Libraries
- From: "l.i.b." <nehal.alum at gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 01:46:51 -0500 (EST)
- Delivered-to: l-mathgroup@mail-archive0.wolfram.com
- References: <jf8qj3$3of$1@smc.vnet.net>
Thanks for your comments. My followups are inlined below: > >** Take for example the following: (Taken from the mathematica 8 > >virtual book section "Applying Functions to Lists and Other > >Expressions") > >geom[list_] := Apply[Times, list]^(1/Length[list]) > >So, this does a bad thing for geom[ x+ y] (returns (Sqrt[x y]) > > What were you expecting here? This looks correct to me the snippet for 'geom' is taken for the mathematica tutorial, and is meant to show the user how to define a function that implements the geometric mean. so for instance, geom[{x,y,z}] = (x y z )^(1/3). But geom[x+y] treats the expression as a list and returns Sqrt[x y], which is not what a new user would expect ( a better answer would be x+y) > > >The built-in function GeometricMean properly complains when given > >this input, > I'm saying GeometricMean does not get fooled by GeometricMean[x+y], which means the author thought of how to protect it from doing the wrong thing -- and it would be nice to see exactly what syntax they used. > > If you want to look at examples of well written Mathematica > packages, a good place to start is to look at the packages that > ship with Mathematica. Actually that's exactly what I've started to do, once I nailed down the location of the bundled packages. Though I've yet to find the definition for GeometricMean in the install directory -- presumable it is a native command. Thanks