Re: Not quite a Swell FLOOP?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg37433] Re: [mg37430] Not quite a Swell FLOOP?
- From: Andrzej Kozlowski <andrzej at tuins.ac.jp>
- Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 00:09:32 -0500 (EST)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Roman Maeder's package is meant for teaching computer science not for general use. Whether Mathematica would benefit from OO functionality has been a matter of some very heated debate, which you can find in this groups archives. Personally I am somewhere in the middle on this. I think it would be useful for developing packages for some very highly structured areas of mathematics (e.g. Algebraic Geometry). But for most applications in mathematics and physics the mixture of pattern based and functional programming offered by Mathematica is close to ideal and an additional programming paradigm would just get in the way. I don't think we need built in support for OOP in Mathematica but I am sure many would welcome a good AddOn package. Andrzej Kozlowski Yokohama, Japan http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~akoz/ http://platon.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/andrzej/ On Monday, October 28, 2002, at 05:40 PM, Steven T. Hatton wrote: > I must admit, Mathematica looks a lot different to me after having > done some > real programming in Java, than it did a few years ago. I understand > it much > better, but I also find myself grasping for things that don't seem to > be > native to the product/language. > > There seems to be virtually no native support for OOP in Mathematica. > Am I > understanding things correctly? Dr. M¡î¡×der (I'm being a bit stubborn > here - > use UTF-8) provides his own object package with his Computer Science > with > Mathematica. I haven't worked with yet, but by looking it over, it > seems a > bit kluged ( > http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=kluge > ). I don't mean to upbraid Dr. M¡î¡×der's attempt to add functionality > which > probably should be a native part of the Mathematica language. Perhaps > I'll > get used to the approach he has used, but for now, I must say, it seems > awkward. My guess is Dr. M¡î¡×der did the best that could be expected > with the > constraints under which he was working. > > It is inconceivable to me that I am the first person to question the > lack of > native OO support in Mathematica. There must be a history of > discussion on > this topic. Is anybody aware of a record of such? Am I not > understanding > things correctly? Do others believe OO support is lacking in > Mathematica, > and really 'should' be here? > -- > STH > Hatton's Law: > "There is only One inviolable Law." > > > >