"George" == George J Carrette <ยทยทยท@delphi.com> writes:
>There is always a party here. But I think the major reason your
>paper struck a nerve has nothing to do with "languages being
>left out" per se, but everything to do with the fact that lisp
>people do not beleive in your fundamental assumption that there
>is a difference between "scripting" and "system programming"
>languages.
Daniel Wang wrote:
> I think there is a real important difference between a "scripting" and
> "systems programming" languages. "scripting" languages are designed to let
> you *manipulate* a certain set of *fixed* abstractions easily. "System
> languages" are desgined to let you *create* new abstractions.
But the point is that a language (eg.Lisp) can do both -- ie: let you
manipulate the provided abstractions, and let you create new ones.
Daniel Wang wrote:
> Sometime certain features that make it easy to manipulate abstractsions
> (special syntax for example) makes it more difficult to add features that
> let you create new abstractions (consider why C++ overloading drives some
> people mad). Strong typing of floats versus int makes sense in C, but seems
> completely crazy in Mathmatica, since in Mathmatica the abstraction you want
> to manipulate are just numbers in the most abstract sense.
Sorry but you have fallen for the warped Mathematica mind-set. Lets say
I have a polynomial whose coefficients are "just numbers in the most
abstract sense". Now I ask for this polynomial to be factorised. The
exact factorisation you get depends on the precise types of those
"abstract numbers" -- a polynomial can factor over the complex numbers,
but NOT over say the real numbers, or the integers. Exactly how and
whether the polynomial factors depends on the precise type of the
numbers. This Mathematica line that everything is "just abstract
numbers" is baloney. What Mathematica actually assumes (by default) is
that everything is a complex number.
graham
--
As you grow up and leave the playground
where you kissed your prince and found your frog
Remember the jester that showed you tears
the script for tears