Re: Assertions in Mathematica?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg113447] Re: Assertions in Mathematica?
- From: "Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma at 12000.org>
- Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2010 06:27:35 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <iabc4e$5hg$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Reply-to: nma at 12000.org
On 10/28/2010 1:26 AM, kj wrote:
> What's the best to implement assertions in Mathematica? By assertions
> I mean statements like assert(exp) in C, which generate an error
> if exp evaluates to false.
>
> This *should* be trivial, but it's Mathematica, so...
>
> Naively, I tried defining:
>
> Assert[exp_, msg__] := If[!exp, Message[msg]; Abort[]]
>
Hello KJ;
May be a build-in Assert function would be nice. But what I do now is
simply check, at the start of the function, manually, using an If[]
statement, on all the "asserts" or conditions that I want satisfied, and
if a condition fail, I Throw a message.
Nothing fancy, but it works well, and it seems to satisfy the need of
what Assert is supposed to do?
Here is an example code I just wrote last night for a school HW, I was
making a function to check for DD matrix and wanted to make sure the
matrix was square, so wanted to assert that a matrix is square, and I
looked to see if there was a MatrixSquareQ built-in Mathematica, but
there was not, so I typed:
----------------------
diagonalDominantMatrixQ[mat_?(MatrixQ[#]&):=Module[{nRow,nCol},
{nRow,nCol}=Dimensions[mat];
(* assert matrix is square *)
If[nRow!= nCol,
Throw["diagonalDominantMatrixQ:: Matrix must be square"]
];
....
]
-----------------------
How is something like the above different from saying
Assert[matrixIsSquare[mat]==True, error.....]
in terms of its final effect it will have on behavior of program? aren't
these equivalent?
> ...which, of course, failed to work (as I've learned to expect);
> instead it produced a cryptic error "Message::name : Message name
> ... is not of the form symbol::name or symbol::name::language."
>
> I tried many other things, but after wasting 1 hour on this
> ridiculously trivial programming task, I'm reduced to begging for
> help. (This, by the way, is always the way it is with me and
> Mathematica, and I've been using it on-and-off for almost 20 years.
> The documentation is as useless to me today as it was 20 years ago.
> I find it as horrible as the rest of Mathematica is brilliant.)
>
> I've posted desperate questions over programming mind-numbing
> trivialities like this one in Mathematica before, i.e. questions
> that seem so elementary and fundamental that no one who has access
> to the documentation and who can read should *ever* have to ask
> them. I ask them less wanting to get the answer to the questions
> themselves than hoping to learn how I could have answered such
> questions by myself. But I've never found how to do this. Those
> who know the answers *already* can give them to me if they feel so
> inclined. (And how they got to know the answer to begin with, I
> don't know; I imagine it took years of sustained Mathematica
> programming. Or maybe they asked a similar question before to
> someone who already knew the answer...) But no one has been able
> to tell me how someone who *doesn't* know the answers to such questions
> already can figure it out without outside help.
>
> But hope springs eternal! If someone is kind enough to tell me
> how I could implement my Assert, I'd be most grateful. If someone
> can tell me how I could have arrived at this answer by myself by
> consulting the documentation, I'd be ecstatic.
>
> TIA,
>
> kj
>
--Nasser