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> These never catch on, and never will. Though I'm no great fan of Mr. Wolfram, I would have to say Mathematica has caught on quite well. Mathematica isn't a L
by psykotic 16y ago
> These never catch on, and never will.
Though I'm no great fan of Mr. Wolfram, I would have to say Mathematica has caught on quite well. Mathematica isn't a Lisp (its semantics are based on term rewriting) but it freely intermixes S-expressions and M-expressions. For example, the M-expression a + b parses into the S-expression Plus[a, b].
- Zak 16y agoMost languages parse in to a parse tree that looks something like S-expressions, but that parse tree isn't always made of the language's own data structures nor available to the user at runtime.
- psykotic 16y agoOf course. Why is that remark relevant here? Mathematica does make its S-expressions available to the user at runtime. They are in fact much more available to the user at runtime than in Lisp because of Mathematica's term rewriting semantics. Furthermore, the transformation from M-expressions into S-expressions isn't a one-way street. By default the notebook interface will render an S-expression as its M-expression equivalent when such exists.