[Haskell-cafe] Implementing Mathematica

[Jon Harrop]

On Thursday 31 May 2007 11:39:14 jerzy.karczmarczuk at 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