Of course, you can use more familiar syntax, but sometimes when you're not sure of the precedence of something it can help to drop down to the explicit form.Īnother nice thing about the syntax is that it makes everything serializable. For example, to check the length of a list and conditionally append something, we have, If > 3, t++]], whose FullForm is actually If, 3], Increment]. Like other LISPS, there is a nice and uniform s-expression syntax 'underneath' the more elaborate syntax. Also useful for operating on rich data structures. Lastly, almost all these functions have support for a 'depth spec' that enables you to say at what level or levels inside your expression you want to operate. You use them all the time to get at parts of your complex expression to process them, count them, remove them, etc. The pattern language was originally designed for writing rules that perform symbolic integration and differentiation, it turns out that the kind of flexibility you need for that is great for general purpose use. Many X also have a ParellelX that takes advantage of multiple cores.Īlso, many of them use the expressive pattern matching 'sub-language' that Mathematica has. Of course you've got the usual Map and Fold and Nest, but then you've get FoldList, NestList, MapThread, MapIndexed, Scan, Cases, DeleteCases, Count, Select, Position, Replace, ReplacePart, ReplaceAll, SortBy, and on it goes (see. Mathematica excels at this, having more 'neat' high-level functions to work with such ad hoc data structures than I've seen in any other language.
Here's a rough list of things that I think make it stand out, written for someone who might not be familiar at all with it.Ī common style of functional programming involves building up quite complex data structures in an add hoc way using lists, symbols, rules, and so on, and then successively transforming these structures.
Perhaps the Part syntax ] is a bit clunky, but I think for the most part the syntax is actually pretty great. There are many respects in which Mathematica is an exceedingly well designed language. So in other words they are allowed by law to charge different prices to different groups of users (by the way why is this fair?) So they set it up as a discount to some users rather than saying "we are going to get Boeing for more because we know they can pay more". Why? Well another reason is it's lets them get more money out of companies. But they aren't going to advertise it and I'm sure an Apple salesman won't tell you about buying this way. So ask yourself why they don't police this better? Because they don't have a problem with anyone doing it otherwise they would. You can also buy from the Apple website and simply choose a school and get the education discount on applicable products. You can get this by presenting a student id of anyone in the Apple store and you get the ed discount. An example of this is Apple's educational pricing. I think what people fail to realize (when they downvoted my comment) is that it is common for companies (based on my 30 years in business) to offer special pricing to groups but not enforce that in any way.
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