Re: EE Student, Edit, Proposal Masters, Help (concepts of functional programming, symbolic programming and MATLAB)

From: Richard Fateman (fateman_at_cs.berkeley.edu)
Date: 03/09/05 

Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2005 16:50:24 GMT

John:
1. You are asking for opinions in a forum in which apparently uninformed
people are offering, in an authoritative voice, incorrect statements.
Since you cannot distinguish the correct from the incorrect, my
recommendation is that you should not be guided by them.

2. Your own writing on symbolic computation is now quite
jumbled. For example, Maple is not an example of a functional
programming language. Maple is a symbolic mathematics system.
It includes some aspects of functional programming, but that it
not a prominent or distinguishing feature.

3. I believe your explanation of pointers now is just wrong.

4. You use words like efficiency, expression, object, parsing,
lazzy (should be lazy) in ways that suggest you do not understand
them.

The simple fact that you want to introduce is, I think, that programming
systems exist which allow the programmer to use symbols such as x,y,z,
and expressions such as x+y, cos(z), etc in a way similar to conventional
numeric values.

Persons unfamiliar with this technology can read about it elsewhere.

RJF

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Commercial Users of Functional Programming Workshop Call for Participation
    ... There may not be any Lisp talks in the program, but we welcome participation from members of the Lisp community. ... Functional Programming As a Means, ... This will be the fifth CUFP; see CUFP 2004 CUFP 2005, CUFP 2006, ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • DEFUN08: Call for Talks & Tutorials (co-located w/ ICFP08)
    ... Call for Talks and Tutorials ... ACM SIGPLAN 2008 Developer Tracks on Functional Programming ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • DEFUN08: Call for Talks & Tutorials (co-located w/ ICFP08)
    ... Call for Talks and Tutorials ... ACM SIGPLAN 2008 Developer Tracks on Functional Programming ...
    (comp.lang.functional)
  • ICFP2006 --- Call for papers
    ... International Conference on Functional Programming ... ICFP 2006 seeks original papers on the art and science of functional ... Submission instructions are available at ...
    (comp.lang.ml)
  • Re: terminology
    ... assignments and procedural programming. ... they had explicitly rejected functional programming for Tutorial D. ... also accepted that Tutorial D wasn't a full blown production language, ... with APL but I have read a fair bit about J and K, ...
    (comp.databases.theory)