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Re: Mathematica to .NET compiler

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg79391] Re: Mathematica to .NET compiler
  • From: David Bailey <dave at Remove_Thisdbailey.co.uk>
  • Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2007 05:20:20 -0400 (EDT)
  • Organization: Customer of PlusNet plc (http://www.plus.net)
  • References: <200707200725.DAA24728@smc.vnet.net> <f7sflm$rs0$1@smc.vnet.net> <f86onh$g19$1@smc.vnet.net>

Jon Harrop wrote:
> David Annetts wrote:
>> What would be the advantages of such a compiler over (say) MathF90 (or
>> MathC++ if you're so inclined) at http://www.mathcore.com/ ?
> 
> The MathCore guys kindly sent me a link to the document describing the
> subset that they support:
> 
>   http://www.mathcore.com/resources/documents/mathcodec++_subset.pdf
> 
> They don't support:
> 
>   Pattern matching
>   Arbitrary-precision arithmetic
>   Symbolic manipulation
>   Negative array indexing
>   Strings
>   IO
>   Efficient array resizing
>   Expressions
> 
> Most of these are easy to implement if you target a higher-level language
> than C++.
> 
Surely to support all those features you would need to write something 
equivalent to a fair portion of the Mathematica kernel - why would your 
code work any faster than Wolfram's? I can't see how something like

expr /. f[a_]->a^2

can usefully be compiled if you don't know the structure of the 
expression at compile time (which you usually don't). As far as I can 
see, all you could compile that into would be a call to your pattern 
matching library code!

Am I missing something here?

David Bailey
http://www.dbaileyconsultancy.co.uk


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