# Tag Info

Accepted

### How to make use of Associations?

I. General I will first try to briefly answer the questions, and then illustrate this with a small but practical application. 1.Speed of insertion / deletion Associations are based on so called Hash ...
• 112k

### Why should I avoid the For loop in Mathematica?

If you are new to Mathematica, and were directed to this post, first see if you can use Table to solve your problem. I have often told people, especially beginners,...
• 227k
Accepted

### Incompatible Changes since Mathematica Version 7?

Prelude The items in this post are not generally regressions; they are simply changes and enhancements that may break code or cause problems in moving from one version to another. The work-arounds ...

### What are the most common pitfalls awaiting new users?

Don't leave the Suggestions Bar enabled The predictive interface (Suggestions Bar) is the source of many bugs reported on this site and surely many more that have yet to be reported. I strongly ...

### How to make use of Associations?

I helped design Association, and I designed and implemented Dataset, so I wanted to comment on question 3: Dataset is designed ...
• 10.5k

### What are the most common pitfalls awaiting new users?

The default $HistoryLength causes Mathematica to crash! By default$HistoryLength = Infinity, which is absurd. That ensures ...
Accepted

### Why is the new PositionIndex horribly slow?

First let me note that I didn't write PositionIndex, so I can't speak to its internals without doing a bit of digging (which at the moment I do not have time to do)....
• 10.5k
Accepted

### What's the difference between Inactive and HoldForm?

Updated Both Hold and Inactive block evaluation; the key difference is that Inactive is ...
• 8,382

### What are the most common pitfalls awaiting new users?

Using Sort incorrectly Sorting mathematical expressions without numeric conversion New users are often baffled by the behavior of ...
Accepted

### What are the requirements for a well behaved indexed variable? Subscript, ToExpression, Downvalue?

General usage Here is what I think Using strings and subsequently ToString - ToExpression just to generate variable names is ...
• 112k

### Why should I avoid the For loop in Mathematica?

Illustration of the timings required to compute the squares i^2 from i=1 to i=10^n for ...
Accepted

### Why it seems that there is no counterpart function as to multiplication, to Total as to addition?

In addition to the previous answer... I designed and implemented Total 17 years ago. Its first version was named ListSum. The ...
• 35.4k
Accepted

### ++ is dangerous for C programmers

I believe Increment (more accurately PreIncrement as george2079 noted) is essentially this: ...
• 265k
Accepted

### Why some built-in functions are slow

The general case There are indeed some functions in Mathematica that are/were not performing nicely. The one I am most scared of is Total (the issue is addressed ...
• 12.1k

### What are all the "magic" Symbols in the Mathematica language?

uh oh, another "work in progress" answer from me that may never be finished. Unevaluated Robby Villegas, Working with Unevaluated Expressions: ...
• 265k
Accepted

### Shorter syntax for Fold and FoldList?

Good News Everyone! Two-parameter syntax for Fold and FoldList has been (silently) implemented! Taliesin Beynon informs me that ...
• 265k

### What are the most common pitfalls awaiting new users?

Why do I get an empty plot? Often new Mathematica users (and some not-so-new users) post questions asking why their plot of some expression just shows axes, with no plotted curve appearing. The key ...
Accepted

### How to completely delete the head of a function expression

You can actually Delete the head of the expression, which is part 0: ...
• 265k

### What is the use of FullForm in Mathematica?

Perhaps there are other uses, but I've primarily used FullForm to "see" what Mathematica "sees". This can be useful when you are trying to do replacements on ...
• 9,961

### Difference between HashTable datastructure and Association datastructure

Summary Important differences between Association and CreateDataStructure["HashTable"] include: associations are ...
• 67.3k
Accepted

### Why is Query so much slower than Part?

Let's start by taking a look at the compiled form of one of our queries: ...
• 67.3k

### Unexpected behaviour from Table[]

This is just a long comment trying to shed light on where the problem may be coming from. Since version 10.2, the following is valid syntax: Table[x, 5] Before ...
• 227k

### Learn Mathematica (Wolfram) Language in one day

I would recommend these two, in the order listed: Wolfram Language: Fast introduction for programmers Besides the generic edition, there are currently two special editions of this tutorial available ...
• 68.9k

### How to make use of Associations?

First of all, it's not a new data structure, it's a new only in a Wolfram Mathematica. About complexity of a data structure. It's a Wolfram implementation of a hash-map. With a complexity of an ...
• 3,817

### Resolving my Entity* Crisis

As an employee at Wolfram who is partly involved with development of the entity framework, let me give my take on things. Particularly, I want to address the following points raised by the OP and in ...
• 847
Accepted

### How can one manually change the rule ordering

General The definitions get reordered at definition-time by a part of the pattern matcher, that takes care of automatic rule reordering. It does so, based on relative generality of rules, as far as ...
• 112k
Accepted

### Around usage results

There's a subtlety here. When operating together multiple Arounds, the two uncertainties will be considered separate and independent (in the statistical sense). ...
• 227k
Accepted

### Row vectors and column vectors (Mathematica vs. MATLAB)

This is a limitation of MATLAB, as MATLAB is only able to work with matrices. It does not have true vectors. It cannot even represent a character array as a 1D array or a structure array as a single ...
• 227k