Thats kind of like buying a Bugatti Veyron to go pick up groceries.

But if you can afford it, more power to you. Mathematica is like $2k IIRC.

It's also available for free on your favorite bittorrent tracker or eMule. I'd use a Bugatti Veyron to get my groceries if I could acquire one for free without causing any economic loss to anyone. Hell, I'd use a new one every single day.

But would you pay for it if you had the money?

i bought mine when i was a student, and it cost me a hundred or two bucks. if i had the money -- yes, i would pay for the non-student version. i don't know of a more multiparadigmy language, and it's more or less the most powerful computational environment available in terms of what you can do

unfortunately the language isn't very readable -- not in the semantic sense, but just how it looks. the usage of square brackets for functions (myFun[arg]) is particularly ugly, and absolutely hideous when nested

For Mathematica, I would buy it if it was required in a specific professional context. For what I normally calculate, Google is fine and I use a TI-89 if I need to solve anything symbolic. Mathematica is significantly harder to use than either of those for me.

And instead of a Bugatti Veyron, I'd get two Tesla Roadsters and buy ten more for friends or as company cars for employees.

I was poking fun : )

> Of course, this works just fine in Mathematica...

Works just fine in bc(1) too.