[Haskell-cafe] Re: Mathematica

[Andrew Coppin]

Chung-chieh Shan wrote:
> Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote in article <4644BA82.4010202 at btinternet.com> in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe:
>   
>> The absurdly efficient number crunching is obviously not implementable 
>> in Haskell - or indeed virtually any language except assembly. [...]
>> The pretty user interface is obviously not implementable in Haskell. [...]
>> It seems it would 
>> be a fairly difficult task to implement the pattern matching engine 
>> properly.
>>     
>
> Why?
>   

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.