On Apr 6, 2014, at 3:56 PM, Richard Fateman <[email protected]> wrote:



On Saturday, April 5, 2014 7:57:10 AM UTC-7, Aaron Meurer wrote:
>
>
>
> On Apr 5, 2014, at 9:14 AM, Richard Fateman <[email protected]<javascript:>>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Saturday, April 5, 2014 12:23:30 AM UTC-7, F. B. wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Thursday, April 3, 2014 5:04:36 PM UTC+2, Aaron Meurer wrote:
>>>
>>> Some people on this list might be interested in this
>>> https://github.com/ContinuumIO/pyalge.
>>>
>>
>>
>> Indeed, that can be very powerful to symbolic math.
>>
>> I don't really like their style of putting the string of the expression
>> inside the dispatching decorator, but otherwise you can't easily freeze
>> expressions to an unevaluated state in Python. That's a point in favor of
>> Julia.
>>
>
> I didn't like that either. I was trying to convince the author not to do
> it that way. You can easily freeze expressions to unevaluated state by just
> not evaluating them.
>
>
>> In any case, in SymPy there are wildcards types, so a possible solution:
>>
>> x = symbols('x')
>> w = Wild('w')
>>
>> @patterndispatch(sin(w*x), assumptions=Q.positive(w))
>> def foo(a):
>>     a**2
>>
>> @patterndispatch(sin(w*x))
>> def foo(a):
>>     a**3
>>
>> # there should be a mechanism that understands which one is more
>> specific.
>> foo(sin(3*x))  # ==> sin(3*x)**2
>> foo(sin(-2*x))  # ==> sin(3*x)**3
>>
>> What do you think about this approach?
>>
>
> I don't know about the details, but the "mechansim that understands ..."
> is computationally infeasible
> except for trivial cases.
>
>
> I think a (well-defined) heuristic would be fine. Assumedly each function
> definition would be mathematically correct, so the worst that would happen
> would be not computing so etching as well as you could.
>

etching?


That's what happens when you compose emails on an ipad. It should just be
"something".


Well, you could use heuristics as does Mathematica, but then you end up
using some
other ordering as does Mathematica, like last-rule-in gets tried first.

If your rules are defined to be non-overlapping, then the order will not
matter except for
efficiency.   If your rules are defined so that special cases are defined
after general cases
(and therefore are tried first) that might work also.
Allowing users to specify the order of rules is another possibility.

However, it turns out that for most people, the complexity of interaction
of rules that overlap
is a substantial opportunity to create bugs that are difficult to cure.   I
do not know if there
have been studies comparing bug frequency or  debugging difficult using
rules vs. using
conventional sequential programming constructs vs. functional-style
programming.


I don't know about bug frequency, but I imagine that proponents from each
camp prefer their favorite paradigm for debugging.

I prefer sequential, but that's because I've gotten good at debugging it.
But that doesn't mean I couldn't learn to debug other paradigms. And IMHO
good debugging depends more on the tools and the insight of the (human)
debugger than the programming language or paradigm.

Aaron Meurer


I prefer functional style because debugging using trace()  works so well.

RJF


>
>
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