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Nice question, to which I do not know the answer. Note that Graphics[...] is also used to 'internally' define any internal graphical object, as you can see wit
by prof-dr-ir 3y ago
Nice question, to which I do not know the answer.
Note that Graphics[...] is also used to 'internally' define any internal graphical object, as you can see with InputForm[Plot[...]]. And the chosen syntax seems particularly easy to parse (so as to generate a bitmap, say). So maybe it was designed primarily with that in mind rather than as an API?
According to the documentation Graphics[] has been a part of Mathematica since v1 from 1988. It is probably one of the functions that did not exist in Mathematica's predecessors (like SMP [1]) which largely focused on symbolic algebra. So it might have been up to Wolfram himself to invent a convenient syntax from scratch.
[1] See https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2013/06/there-was-a-time-before-mathematica/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2013/06/there-was-a-time... but, in typical Wolfram style, insufficient credit seems to be given to other symbolic manipulation products that existed at the time.