xahlee@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> Of interest:
>
> a blog post from Wolfram Research:
>
>
http://blog.wolfram.com/2008/04/29/today-we-broke-the-bernoulli-record-from-the-analytical-engine-to-mathematica/
>
> this illustrates, partially, the power of having a full set of
> mathematical functions build in, as part of the language.
There are two main problems with this:
Firstly, finding the 10 millionth Bernoulli number is of no practical
importance.
Secondly, the implementation is written almost entirely in C and is simply
called from Mathematica code.
IMHO, there are better illustrations of the power of the Mathematica
language.
> from the perspective in the evolution of computer languages, one
> characteristics is that the language becomes easier to use with more
> power. e.g., assembly-like, C, Fortran, to C++, Java, to awk, bash,
> then Perl, Python, and tcl, PHP, VisualBasic, Javascript, NewLisp, and
> Mathematica.
Subjective.
> One way to put a language in a evolution class, is simply to think of
> how many lines of code is typical to do one thing. Another way to
> think of this is, what level of learning a language requires its user
> to use it.
You can easily pick a task that Mathematica is very poorly suited to,
which
completely inverts your notion of "evolution".
> We could, for example, say that all languages in year 2020, will all
> have full mathematcial functions build in.
There is a lot more to programming than mathematics.
--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?u
|
