[Haskell-cafe] Re: Mathematica

[Tomasz Zielonka]

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