Re: Opinions about the "Oneliners"
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg40453] Re: Opinions about the "Oneliners"
- From: nafod40 <may106 at SPAMAWAY.psu.edu>
- Date: Sun, 6 Apr 2003 04:34:17 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: Penn State University, Center for Academic Computing
- References: <b6e7j6$85b$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Gerry Flanagan wrote: > 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 > problem is that I have a couple of people that can program in Mathematica style - > very compact functional form, but the people that don't use Mathematica everyday > can never parse how the functions work. Ditto for us. The oneliners are clever tricks, but they are essentially opaque. A thick one liner can take even a decent (by our standards) Mathematica programmer far too long to understand. I'm a big fan of using typography > (indenting and other visual aids) in programming, but Mathematica makes even those > methods difficult. I'm tempted to ban prefix and postfix notation in > packages because they can make for very opaque code. Another roadblock to those methods is that math typesetting and things like special fonts, font colors, and embedded comments play havoc with Mathematica's package autogeneration capability. It's been that way since version 3. I don't understand why they leave those bugs in.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: Re: Opinions about the "Oneliners"
- From: David Terr <dterr@wolfram.com>
- Re: Re: Opinions about the "Oneliners"