Re: How to Explain This Behavior of Simple Procedures?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg109642] Re: How to Explain This Behavior of Simple Procedures?
- From: Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu>
- Date: Sun, 9 May 2010 07:51:34 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <hs3gjn$ru6$1@smc.vnet.net>
James Stein wrote:
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> My motivation here is to allow a procedure to return one or more subsidiary
> results in variables provided by the caller.
I suggest you re-think this motivation, since it leads to subtle bugs,
and is probably difficult to do in Mathematica. I suggest you have a
routine return a list of values. You can pick them out this way..
> {a,b,c} = {1,2,3} assigns values to a and b and c.
This design abides more by functional abstraction.
I haven't looked at the details of your example, but Mathematica's
evaluation of names that are locally bound is a mess.
Good luck.
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