[plt-scheme] Mathematica v6

On Nov 15, 2007 12:05 PM, David Einstein <deinst at gmail.com> wrote:

> I once used closures (in a problem which cried out for them) and got a
> response something like "Hmmn ... cute ... don't do that."
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> The foundation of Mathematica reminds me more of defmacro than
> anything else, and as with defmacro, if you try to get too tricky you
> pay for your sins.  It is very easy to get into areas of the language
> where the semantics are far from clear.

I wholeheartedly second this.  I once tried to implement a symbolic
tensor manipulation package in Mathematica (sort of a copy of
GRTensor, but functionally), and the odd evaluation rules and the fact
that I could never figure out how to get real lexical scope ("With",
"Module", and friends don't quite do it) made me give up.  That said,
just like David, I would be very sad if you took my copy away---it's
libraries make it indispensable for some tasks.

Will