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Re: Opinions about the "Oneliners"

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg40439] Re: Opinions about the "Oneliners"
  • From: "Albert REINER" <Use-Author-Address-Header at [127.1]>
  • Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2003 04:00:48 -0500 (EST)
  • Author-address: areiner <AT> tph <DOT> tuwien <DOT> ac <DOT> at
  • Organization: mail2news@nym.alias.net
  • References: <b6e7j6$85b$1@smc.vnet.net>
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

> Actually, this is a pretty serious problem. We've been trying to make 
> Mathematica a standard language for our engineering firm, but I've 
> struggled for years with developing good documentation standards. The 
...

You might be interested in "literate programming" - any system should
do well (ask at <news:comp.programming.literate>; I happen to prefer
noweb <http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nr/noweb/intro.html>, BTW); there
is also a system specific for Mathematica, viz. TeX/Mathematica
<http://www.agh.edu.pl/pub/tex/macros/mathematica/>, which presupposes
a working emacs installation. I have no idea how well it would work on
non-Unix systems, though.

...
> methods difficult. I'm tempted to ban prefix and postfix notation in 
> packages because they can make for very opaque code. Many years ago, 
...

Conversely, I feel that they make for very readable code:

    expr //
      f1 //
      f2

shows me the expression I start from, and tells me that the functions
are applied in some sequence that (hopefully) makes sense; and the @
character in /@, @@, etc. is such a nice dark blotch on the screen
that it stands out visually much more prominently than square brackets
(I hardly use ~f~ - usually the precedence doesn't fit for me.)

Regards,

Albert.


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