1.2.3 Making Lists of ObjectsIn doing calculations, it is often convenient to collect together several objects, and treat them as a single entity. Lists give you a way to make collections of objects in Mathematica. As you will see later, lists are very important and general structures in Mathematica. A list such as {3, 5, 1} is a collection of three objects. But in many ways, you can treat the whole list as a single object. You can, for example, do arithmetic on the whole list at once, or assign the whole list to be the value of a variable. | Here is a list of three numbers. | |
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| This squares each number in the list, and adds 1 to it. | |
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| This takes differences between corresponding elements in the two lists. The lists must be the same length. | |
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{6, 7, 8} - {3.5, 4, 2.5}
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| The value of % is the whole list. | |
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| You can apply any of the mathematical functions in Section 1.1.3 to whole lists. | |
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Just as you can set variables to be numbers, so also you can set them to be lists. | This assigns v to be a list. | |
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| Wherever v appears, it is replaced by the list. | |
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