Should I report this as a Bug? I can't comment string with ")" inside it. I discovered when I tried to comment a expression with this Regular expression inside: RegularExpression["((re))trasado"]

anothe bug... can't write *

after re

Simpler, can't comment strings with *) inside it

ok.. using the chat as Rubber Duck, definitively this is a bug..

@Murta The characters "()*" all have special meaning in a regular expression. You must escape them, e.g. RegularExpression["\\(\\* comment \\*\\)"]. The double escapes are necessary because WL does not have a native RegEx type and thus they must be encoded in strings. In WL strings, backslashes need to be escaped. After WL string escapes are stripped the effective regex is \(\* comment \*\). As if regex were not unreadable enough already... :)

There are many characters that have special meaning in regex -- check the docs.

@WReach Just copy this in a notebook:

(*"this is a bug*)"*)

@Murta @WReach If you are interested, I can tell you where this bug comes from and that it won't get fixed.

@halirutan Ah, I see. I misunderstood the complaint. Yes, that is a bug, and a long-standing one at that I believe.

@halirutan I'll bite :)

@WReach @Murta When I'm correct, then it comes from the fact that strings are processed in the lexical scanner and (probably nested) comments are done in the parser. At least this would explain it.

So when the tokenizer runs through your input (*"this is a bug*)"*) then it first sees the token COMMENT_OPEN

Forget what I said so far. The reverse seems to be true.

@WReach @Murta Let me check why the IDEA plugin makes it wrong because I thought it should work there but it doesn't.

@WReach @Murta OK, right. Mathematica seems to make like I do and this is wrong in this rare case. OK, the lexical scanner sees the COMMENT_OPEN and then I'm going into a special state because I know everything that follows is comment. I read input as long as I don't see a COMMENT_CLOSE.

Obviously, Strings don't have a special meaning in comments because you should be able to put anything you like inside a comment. Therefore, the quotes " are not indicating the beginning of a new string inside a comment. The lexer stupidly reads until the *). In this case he overreads the quotes which leaves the lexer in the assumption that what follows the *) is correct syntax again.

@WReach I know about special characters in regex. In this case I need * as a special repetition pattern, and even with \, the problem would persist.

@Murta Yeah, I caught onto that eventually with halirutan's help. I just responded to the question.

I discovered it when I tried to comment a big block of code, and I get this error.

@halirutan Yes, I think your explanation is correct.

@halirutan tks. Make all sense. I have to take more care when commenting something for now on. :)

Specially when dealing with a lot of regular expressions.

@WReach I tinkered a bit inside your answer. Please re-edit everything you don't like.

@halirutan Looks good to me. Thanks.

@halirutan @WReach. How should I tag this question? It's not a bug

@Murta @halirutan I think WRI could make a strong case for it not being a bug. Perhaps the "syntax" tag?

@Murta Not sure. MrWiz is the expert with such things.

@WReach Agreed, syntax is probably the best tag.

@Murta I wrote a solution to your problem.

Cool.. I learned something new today, life's make more sense based on Neil Tayson theory (youtube.com/watch?v=ZhGMOgkgabk) :)

@halirutan Nice.

@halirutan nice. I'll use it.

@bobthechemist What is supposed to be the latest Mathematica release for the Raspberry Pi? I get August 4, 2014, $VersionNumber is 10 and $ReleaseNumber is 0.

Awesome.. I just love it

@halirutan Sail into the black ....

@rm-rf When I remember right then it was you who told somewhere that the language identification on GitHub is re-started with a new push. I have touched almost all files of this project last night and still, the main package file is identified as MATLAB. Anything else I can do about it except for reporting it?

After many years of resistance I am having to use Matlab for some work. Does anyone know of any good Matlab learning resources specifically for Mathematica users? Eg a summary of similarities and differences between them, or a table of Matlab equivalents to Mathematica functions.

@SimonWoods I guess @Szabolcs or @rm-rf could be of help here since they wrote the MATLink.

@Szabolcs That's the one. To my knowledge, there aren't any newer releases in the pipeline at this point.

@SimonWoods I find this page from @Nasser quite helpful. Many side-by-side comparisons of the two languages without the marketing hype.

If there's a package you developed or one that you use often and find useful, it would be nice to add it here with a brief description:

@halirutan The IDEA plugin is not technically a Mathematica package but it would be good to post it in that thread.

@Szabolcs Yes I can do that. I have the feeling that I write the same stuff on many many places. I make announcements here, in the WC, on the web-page, bug-tracker and email-newsletter.

I do this because I'm a bit afraid that someone who is actually looking for something like the plugin doesn't find it and uses a different solution instead although he would be another precious user. That's why I'm doing what you usually should not do: Repeat myself.

Currently, we have a total of 7365 downloads. This is at least something. On the other hand, no-one has rated the plugin on the idea page so far. I guess this is somewhat important since the stars appear in IDEA when you are searching for plugins.

@halirutan The rating system is flawed. It's necessary to create an account to rate (big barrier) and I don't think anyone visits that page anyway because it has nothing of interest there. Even plugins with many more downloads have only a few ratings. The most ratings I found after randonly clicking around was 8.

Yes, well the popular languages like C++ have ~40 ratings, but what's that compared to 80,000 downloads?

I guess I could rate it, but is that going to be a fair rating? :)

@Szabolcs What I had in mind is how it looks if someone finds the plugin and there is no rating at all.

I would think the thing isn't used by anyone.

Markdown: 1.1 million downloads (!) and 37 ratings.

I think a rating of 2 or 3 stands out much more than no rating or a 5 star rating.

A returned a very large array to Mathematica from LibraryLink. Strangely Mean[arr] gave Indeterminate but Mean[arr[[All]]] gave 1.8. It took quite a while to figure out what was going on. It turns out that the array contained a single floating point NaN value, which will throw Mathematica off-balance.

Beware of Infs and NaNs!! They behave unpredictably and cause all sorts of trouble. mathematica.stackexchange.com/q/19026/12

@Szabolcs Been there, did that :-(