Indeed, 4 ways to get the same result.
Actually, two ways. I meant that there are two truly distinct expressions which seem to have the same functionality, not that there are several notations for it.
It is clear to me what it is advantageous to have both the @*
and /*
notations. What is not clear to me is whether there's a good reason have these notations correspond to distinct expressions.
But what's wrong with that? Is Mathematica not famous for having several ways to achieve the same end result?
There's nothing wrong with it. Rather, I'm curious if there's a compelling reason to distinguish between them. I suspected that this was a carefully considered decision and that there are some interesting reasons that are not immediately obvious.
If we were to look for counter-reasons: it increases complexity when one needs to handle Composition
in a special way. On example: while normally Composition
and RightComposition
behave the same way except for the ordering, this is not the case within Dataset
. op1 /* op2
won't have the same effect as op2 @* op1
. Perhaps this is a bug (is it?) arising from the fact the RightComposition
requires special handling within Dataset
and this special handling wasn't implemented for Composition
... ?