Noqsi
Posts:
44
Registered:
12/8/10
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Re: Mathematica and Lisp
Posted:
Jan 16, 2013 1:38 AM
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On Friday, January 11, 2013 8:23:16 PM UTC-7, amzoti wrote:
> It is clear the Mathematica uses Lisp as one of the example programming paradigms it pulls from and I have a general question regarding this.
Perhaps not as much as you think. Mathematica is fundamentally a term rewriting system, a more general concept than the lambda calculus behind Lisp. To be sure, the easiest thing to express as term rewriting is the replacement of a function invocation by its body (as in the lambda calculus), but Mathematica can do more complex things, some rather strange from the lambda calculus point of view. Consider
f_[whoCalled]^:=f
Sin[whoCalled]
which yields
Sin
Very alien to Lisp!
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