Truth be told, I've never encountered a moment I could teach anything. I once thought I was getting somewhere with a moment of inertia but then it just sort of spun off.

(Do you really first moment that?)

I can of course do much worse: "Kurt owes his sister five dollars after losing a bet that he couldn't name the fourth moment in a distribution"

It's worth adding that since everything is an expression then a notebook can be set up where each cell has its own namespace though this is not the default. (not something you'd cover in a 2 week course though!) The Option to the Cell expression that can do this is CellContext. For example, execute the following in a notebook to create a Cell with a unique context to that cell.

CellPrint@ExpressionCell[Defer[f = 9], "Input", CellContext -> Cell]

Hi D.P.,

this is not the place where homework questions are answered - usually! But in case of stupid questions and stupid course concepts help is in order!

• A: False, because you can run scripts;
• B: Wrong!
• C: True - because everything is an expression!
• D: Wrong - because %% is the penultimate result;

Just as a reserved advice: Try to learn Mathematica on your own and (at least as a start) for its own sake; it is definitely worth the effort! And: Mathematica has a high degree of consistency and beauty and is by no means as ugly as those courses with those questions typically imply! What a sad thing!

Regards -- Henrik

The answer to the new question is (A). Or rather, that's what the professor wants to see. The problem is that the prof does not seem to really get the structure of Mathematica, and is more or less imposing a mental picture based on knowledge of other languages. The idea seems to be that single brackets denote "application of a function" and double brackets denote "part(s) of a list or list-like thing". As an approximation to the underlying structure of Mathematica this has some merit. But it is far from the full picture (which is better captured by what was already stated: "everything is an expression").

I should say that I don't really object to this because profs have their varying areas of expertise, and throwing two weeks of Mathematica into a larger course means there is some likelihood the instructor may not have much expertise on that particular unit. What does seem bothersome is the misdirected emphases in regard to Mathematica that are appearing on the exams.