On Wed, 11 Mar 2009 at 04:52PM -0700, seber...@spawar.navy.mil wrote: > Mathematica seems to have been successful with this approach. I'm > curious what were the reasons for its disapproval. Perhaps it was > feared it was error prone?
I've written Mathematica notebooks for multivariable calculus labs, and taught those labs...and the implicit multiplication was ultimately more trouble than it was worth. I don't know how many times I had students claim that "this doesn't work at all", and when I had them put a space in "xy", their plots worked perfectly. Mathematica's fonts and typesetting don't always make it easy to distinguish between "x y" and "xy", which makes it difficult to write and debug code in the notebook. Eventually with those labs, all instances of implicit multiplication were replaced with * and the course adopted a policy of always requiring asterisks for multiplication. It made many things much, much easier. I'm glad Sage defaults to explicit multiplication. Dan -- --- Dan Drake <dr...@kaist.edu> ----- KAIST Department of Mathematical Sciences ------- http://mathsci.kaist.ac.kr/~drake
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