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I come from C programming, and as clear as they may be, I do not understand many of the examples in the documentation.

Would it be on topic to ask for a C "translation" of some examples?

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  • I frankly think it's not necessarily so much about if it's appropriate, but rather that often there is no practical way to translate examples to C...
    – kirma
    Jun 13, 2019 at 7:06
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    Can you give two or three examples of questions that you would have?
    – Carl Lange
    Jun 13, 2019 at 7:50
  • @CarlLange for example the example for Reap and Sow reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Reap.html reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Sow.html
    – mattiav27
    Jun 13, 2019 at 8:37
  • And you would be asking "What is the C equivalent of the Reap and Sow functionality?"
    – Carl Lange
    Jun 13, 2019 at 8:42
  • @CarlLange yes.
    – mattiav27
    Jun 13, 2019 at 8:48
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    I personally think it would be on topic, since we do get questions like that about Matlab. However, I don't think you'd be broadly successful in getting answers. Perhaps better to ask specific questions about things you don't understand asking for further explanation (with your C experience in mind), rather than questions that ask for equivalent functionality in a different language. Answerers may not be C programmers and you might alienate them by asking for C translations when what you might really need is a different explanation.
    – Carl Lange
    Jun 13, 2019 at 9:07

1 Answer 1

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Posting my comment as an answer, but don't take my opinion as fact:

I personally think it would be on topic, since we do get questions like that about Matlab (edit: turns out, we do not get exactly this type of question, but we do get IMO similar questions). However, I don't think you'd be broadly successful in getting answers.

Perhaps better to ask specific questions about things you don't understand asking for further explanation (with your C experience in mind), rather than questions that ask for equivalent functionality in a different language.

Answerers may not be C programmers and you might alienate them by asking for C translations when what you might really need is a different explanation.

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  • Can you narrow your query to examples of questions where OP gives WL code and the answer is a Matlab code? Because that is the case here.
    – Kuba Mod
    Jun 14, 2019 at 7:53
  • Fair enough, that's a good point - usually the questions are more like "How can I do this like I do it in Matlab". I suppose this is what I mean in the third and fourth paragraph of my answer, by asking for a different explanation with the user's C experience in mind than asking for explicit C code.
    – Carl Lange
    Jun 14, 2019 at 8:31
  • I agree with the second part (+1) but not with the first part (-1) :)
    – Kuba Mod
    Jun 14, 2019 at 8:47

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