Re: precedence for ReplaceAll?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg110640] Re: precedence for ReplaceAll?
- From: AES <siegman at stanford.edu>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:49:25 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <i0cjk9$88h$1@smc.vnet.net>
In article <i0cjk9$88h$1 at smc.vnet.net>,
Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I am not sure what outcome you are looking for here.
Something like the following:
* Wolfram identifies, from user test panels that they set up, or from
monitoring particularly frequent queries or complaints in user forums
like this one, those "gotchas" in Mathematica that are particularly
likely to be encountered by novice or unsophisticated or unsuspecting
users, or particularly likely to cause serious damage.
("Particularly frequent" might be defined as the top 1% of all such
encounters.)
* And Wolfram then attempts to forestall these damaging encounters, or
attempts to assist users in recovering from them as quickly as possible,
by, as appropriate:
--Adding brief warnings about those specific gotchas in prominent
locations in the ref/ or elementary tutorial/ documentation that one
would go to if one encountered such a gotcha.
("Prominent location" is operationally described as "On the first screen
that opens when you go to this documentation".)
--Or, adding a small number of user-enable-able or disable-able warning
flags that will be displayed if the user issues a command that may raise
one of these gotchas.
Mathematica has, what, about 5000 commands in its vocabulary? Maybe 50
of those commands account for 90% of the gotchas that occur? Adding
maybe 50 such warnings or warning flags wouldn't be a good idea?