Re: Lisp and Scheme with fewer parentheses / Mathematica??

In article
<a4fa6a2d-2eed-4ea9-bb83-d8b27cfe703b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Xah Lee <xah@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

2008-01-07

I just ran into a newsgroup post, where the redoubtable Richard J
Fateman (a well-known Mathematica hater) sullies Mathematica by
sputtering computer sciency obfuscation.

Here's the source of the message:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/163eb656becfcab6?dmode=source

You may want to read Richard's mail again and check what he is saying.

He is basically right.

Mathematica is a rule-based rewrite-system at its core.
That makes it substantially different from the evaluation
'rules' of (Common) Lisp.

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/03_ab.htm

or older:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node55.html#SECTION00900000000000000000


Compare that with

http://documents.wolfram.com/mathematica/book/section-2.6.1
http://documents.wolfram.com/mathematica/book/section-2.6.4


That's why I said in another posting that you need to understand
the evaluation / compilation model of Lisp.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Lisps QUOTE and Mathematicas "Hold"
    ... So all Mathematica equivalents must be quoted at least ... So cannot be a Lisp equivalent of anything in Mathematica, ... >> not trying to say that the subsequent evaluation of the enclosing ... to implement Mathematica's capabilities in Lisp, i.e. using s-exprs. ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Fundamentals of the Mathematica Programming Language note set by Richard J. Gaylord available
    ... to give you a flavor of what i am trying to emphasize in the note set, ... Mathematica Programming Fundamentals: ... When the lhs of a rewrite ... Evaluation then proceeds by searching for further matching ...
    (sci.math.symbolic)
  • Re: Lisp and Scheme with fewer parentheses / Mathematica??
    ... Try to get out of lisp mindset, and view things from general humanity. ... whether, is it reasonable, to say that programing in mathematica is ... Lisp has a 'simpler' and more straight forward model evaluation model. ... is more to be a straight-forward implementation language ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Lisps QUOTE and Mathematicas "Hold"
    ... If Lisp was virtually the same as Mathematica, programs could only be written to use ... and would therefore be evaluated to produce, which is not a self-evaluating form and would therefore be evaluated to produce 3, which is a self-evaluating form and would therefore not be evaluated because further evaluation would have no effect. ... Presumably, a Lisp which used Mathematica-style evaluation would want to be a Lisp-1, so this kind of problem could not occur. ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Very poor Lisp performance / about Mathematica
    ... his personal experience interacting with Mathematica. ... assume that Jon has the language design and semantics experience to ... , the order of evaluation is not specified, but the ... > Just as you use quote in a Lisp macro. ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)