Re: Lisp syntax vs. Mathematica syntax

josephoswaldgg@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Mathematica takes a TOTALLY different approach to programming
> abstraction. And I'd hardly consider the resulting dog's breakfast as
> "no problem."

You can write a term-level interpreter for Mathematica just as you can write
an interpreter for any other language. You can write programs in
Mathematica as you would in other languages. It is, after all, evaluated in
basically the same way.

> Look how much punctuation Mathematica introduces to keep "infix"
> notation going.
> ...

Just to clarify, many of the symbols that you've listed are simply infix
functions. You've also omitted a lot of Mathematica's syntax (which is
unusually complicated).

Mathematica can also be very concise. For example, the following squares
each element in a list "l":

#^2&/@l

The OCaml equivalent is:

List.map (fun x -> x*x) l

The C++ equivalent is:

int sqr(int x) { return x*x; }
transform(l.begin(), l.end(), l.begin(), sqr);

OCaml's grammar contains much of the complexity but also a great deal more
(such as the typing of polymorphic variants). To put things in perspective,
my (incomplete) Mathematica grammar was 200LOC and OCaml's grammer is
1,500LOC.

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com
.

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