

Arithmetic is Hard--To Get Right: Wolfram Research on Excel bug - hhm
http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/09/arithmetic_is_hardto_get_right.html

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derek
Article summary:

Math is hard, buy Mathematica, buy Mathematica, here's a picture of Excel, buy
Mathematica, buy Mathematica, math is hard unless you buy Mathematica, buy
Mathematica, BUY MATHEMATICA, BUY MATHEMATICA, ... I SAID BUY MATHEMATICA OR
MATH WILL BE HARD!!! BUY IT!!! BUY IT NOW!!!

Note that the salesmanship in the summary is a bit more subtle than the actual
article.

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mhartl
This reminds me of a bug in Mathematica from back in the late '90: there was a
whole class of sums that Mathematica said were negative, even though each term
in the sum was strictly positive! "Carry problem", my ass.

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kcl
He's convinced me. I'm going to use Mathematica for all my spreadsheets now.

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jsjenkins168
Thats kind of like buying a Bugatti Veyron to go pick up groceries.

But if you can afford it, more power to you. Mathematica is like $2k IIRC.

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rms
It's also available for free on your favorite bittorrent tracker or eMule. I'd
use a Bugatti Veyron to get my groceries if I could acquire one for free
without causing any economic loss to anyone. Hell, I'd use a new one every
single day.

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palish
But would you pay for it if you had the money?

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tokipin
i bought mine when i was a student, and it cost me a hundred or two bucks. if
i had the money -- yes, i would pay for the non-student version. i don't know
of a more multiparadigmy language, and it's more or less the most powerful
computational environment available in terms of what you can do

unfortunately the language isn't very readable -- not in the semantic sense,
but just how it looks. the usage of square brackets for functions (myFun[arg])
is particularly ugly, and absolutely hideous when nested

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axod
Yeah arithmetic is so hard most _calculators_ have bugs in them... oh wait a
second...

