Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Mathematica

Chung-chieh Shan wrote:

Andrew Coppin wrote in article <4644BA82.4010202@btinternet.com> in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe:

...

The absurdly efficient number crunching is obviously not implementable in Haskell - or indeed virtually any language except assembly. [...] The pretty user interface is obviously not implementable in Haskell. [...] It seems it would be a fairly difficult task to implement the pattern matching engine properly.

Why?

Writing *insanely* efficient number chrunking software requires a deep understanding of the target architecture, and lots of playing with very low-level constructs. Assembly is really the only language you can do it with; even C is probably too high-level. The "notebook" interface is very sophisticated and clearly beyond the capabilities of any current GUI toolkit for Haskell. (Implementing this would be approximately as hard as writing a full web browser in Haskell.) The pattern matching engine could be implemented, but it's not a trivial task. Mathematica's pattern matching is quite sophisticated. It would take someone a while to do, that's all.