programming, using op(), was ..RE: Bugfix for GosperSum? (was: cannot load Zeilberger)

On Sat, Jan 06, 2007 at 06:27:10PM -0700, Robert Dodier wrote:
> On 1/6/07, Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 
> > Also, be aware that op()  takes a fair amount of time and space,
> > since it formats its argument.
> 
> If op is a bottleneck for many programs, we should work on
> speeding up nformat then. Better than than to tell every user
> to use a more obscure alternative.
> 
> > Else  case(inpart(expr,0),
> >            ["+", yyy],
> >            ["*", zzz],
> >            [otherwise, ...])
> 
> I'm not opposed to having a case statement, but I don't like
> constructs that don't distinguish the different parts.
> I don't think a list of 2-element expressions has anything to
> recommend it, except it would be easy to implement.

I like the two element lists... for what it's worth. It's easy to
balance them using syntax flashing in text editors, it's relatively
easy to explain how it works... and the syntactic elements are easy to
see, whereas "else" and "case" and other keywords look more like
identifiers than syntactic seperators.

my 2c



-- 
Daniel Lakeland
dlakelan at street-artists.org
http://www.street-artists.org/~dlakelan