On Thursday 31 May 2007 11:39:14 jerzy.karczmarczuk@info.unicaen.fr wrote:
... Mathematica changed a bit the perspective, along - perhaps - the same lines as Schoonschip, where the fundamental stuff was *rewriting/ transformations*. So, Mathematica since the begininng was equipped with a very powerful pattern-matcher/substitution contraption. For the sake of efficiency it was less powerful than a general unifier, but it was really nice (and it existed already in SMP, before the birth of Mathematica). Now, again, somebody would do that in 4 days?? The semantic pattern-matcher within an algebraic package, is worlds apart from the syntactic/structural pattern-matcher of Haskell.
Can you elaborate on this? I would imagine that the pattern matcher in a term-level Haskell interpreter would be quite similar to one from a toy Mathematica-like rewriter. Also, what aspects of this do you think would take more than 4 days? -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. OCaml for Scientists http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/?e