Re: Opinions about the "Oneliners"
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg40690] Re: Opinions about the "Oneliners"
- From: Bill Rowe <listuser at earthlink.net>
- Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2003 02:20:07 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
On 4/12/03 at 3:13 AM, NewsGroups at double*NOSPAM*esolutions.com (Paul McHale) wrote: >On Fri, 11 Apr 2003 06:42:44 +0000 (UTC), Dr Bob ><majort at cox-internet.com> wrote: >>Do, While, and For are often the least efficient (slowest) way to do >>things in terms of execution time. We see this time after time in >>our function wars. >Isn't this just because Mathematica was optimized for functional >programming. Couldn't it be optimized for procedural as well (like >every C compiler) ? Possibly this is true but changing Mathematica to optimize for proceedural programming is likely to be a major undertaking. I for one, would much rather see WRI spending thier resources eliminating bugs in the current version and adding functionality than changing the fundamental way Mathematica is organized and optimized. In effect, the desire for optimized proceedural programming constructs is a desire to make use of things already learned. While I can understand the desire to maximize previous learning, it doesn't seem reasonable to expect proceedural programming constructs to be optimal for all problems that would be useful to solve in Mathematica. And since Mathematica is optimized for a functional model, it seems to me a good investment of time to learn that model if you are using Mathematica much at all.