Programming: The Beauty and Power of the Wolfram Language
José Guillermo Sánchez León · 2017
This chapter discusses some of the basic concepts that we need to know to program in Mathematica using the Wolfram Language. It covers some useful notions for generating efficient code. The chapter includes examples of some of the most commonly used programming functions and describes the fundamental ideas behind package development, essential to build new applications that incorporate user-defined functionality. It provides guidance on tools available for large projects or to develop programs that can be run from a browser. Mathematica is not only a program to perform symbolic and numeric calculations. It is a complete technical system that can be used to develop anything: from traffic control applications to sophisticated image manipulation interfaces. Symbols are the name of one of the types of atomic objects in Mathematica . They can be: letters, digits, combinations of letters and digits not starting with a digit, and special symbol, upper and lower-case letters are distinguished.