Elements of Mathematica Programs

Mathematica can be used in the same fashion as a traditional programming language, such a fortran or C.  For  frequently used programs or computationally intensive applications, Mathematica is not the best programming language choice, but it can be very effective as a way to test out ideas or generate a single numerical result.

Evaluating a sequence of instrutions (;;;)

Note above that line breaks without ";" are points where the instructions get executed. This three-line sequence has five executions and produces two lines of output and the instructions get executed sequentially.

Loops

In this case, Do does not produce screen output. The following will and is a simple illustration of how formatted output can be programmed:

Note above that we have asked Mathematica to create a list of two-element lists...

In the instruction above, note that the variable "datatable" is a list. In Mathematica, variables can be numbers, expressions, lists, plots, ...  We will see that this feature is very useful.

Created by Wolfram Mathematica 6.0  (06 September 2007)