Mathematica 7 compares to other languages

[Gerard flanagan]

Xah Lee wrote:
> On Dec 10, 2:47 pm, John W Kennedy <jwke... at attglobal.net> wrote:
>> Xah Lee wrote:
>>> In lisp, python, perl, etc, you'll have 10 or so lines. In C or Java,
>>> you'll have 50 or hundreds lines.
[...]
> 
> Thanks to various replies.
> 
> I've now gather code solutions in ruby, python, C, Java, here:
> 
> • A Example of Mathematica's Expressiveness
>   http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/Mathematica_expressiveness.html
> 
> now lacking is perl, elisp, which i can do well in a condensed way.
> It'd be interesting also to have javascript... 

mmm, stone soup...

javascript:

var map = function(fn, a) {
     var b = new Array(a.length);
     for (i = 0; i < a.length; i++) {
         b[i] = fn(a[i]);
     }
     return b
};

var reduce = function(fn, a, init) {
     var s = init;
     for (i = 0; i < a.length; i++) {
         s = fn(s, a[i]);
     }
     return s
};

var sum = function(a) {
     return reduce(function(x, y) { return x + y }, a, 0.0)
};

var norm = function(a) {
     var pow = Math.pow;
     return Math.sqrt(sum(map(function(x) { return pow(x, 2) }, a)))
};

var Unit = function(a) {
     var N = norm(a);
     return map(function(x) { return x/N }, a)
};