On Sun, May 13, 2007 at 02:19:55PM +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
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.
Thanks, that's exactly what we need - someone telling it's impossible motivating somebody else to prove it isn't ;-) BTW, how do you know that Mathematica's number chrunking software is written in assembler? Do they brag about it? Best regards Tomek