Re: Maple Vs Mathematica debugging



carlos@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: 
The reviewer prefers the Maple GUI and front end, and found
the lack of a Mathematica debugger annoying.



Lack of a debugger is most annoying to beginner users, but
there are in fact 3 major builtin pieces missing in the kernel:

1) incremental debugger (or even a plain debugger)
2) error tracer
3) real-time breakpointer and "cook-timer"

I wonder: is there a functional language based application that
now includes those 3 components?  The old vaxima (Lisp based)
I used during 1982-88 had some rudiments of 1) and 3)


I am not sure what you mean exactly by the three pieces.
Lisp code (and programs written in Lisp) generally allow

1. stepping through code or selected pieces of code "one step
at a time".
2. a "backtrace" which tells you, when you have encountered an
error, where it happened and what the sequence of active calls
was.
3. A "break" facility by which you can insert a "pause" and then
look at backtraces etc, perhaps change values, and then
 continue.  It is also usually
possible to get into a "break" by hitting a key, e.g. the "break"
key, during a program execution. Sometimes it is hard to get the
attention of the program though.

Why might this be troublesome in Mathematica?

I think that contributing to the difficulty of debugging Mathematica
code (or even writing a useful debugger for Mathematica) is the
disparity between what the user thinks he is writing (programs)
and what Mathematica is executing (pattern-replacement rules). So
the failure of Mathematica to reflect what the user is trying to
do may be based on the fact that Mathematica is doing something else
entirely, at least some of the time.

The reviewer in the cited article had a particular highly oscillatory
integral that Mathematica could numerically integrate and Maple could
do only very slowly. It seems to me that the method could be added
to Maple without much difficulty, and also the method might be irrelevant to most people trying to decide between the two programs. Nevertheless, the reviewer seemed quite upfront about how he formed his opinion.


.

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