Re: Mathematica and Lisp
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg129921] Re: Mathematica and Lisp
- From: John Doty <noqsiaerospace at gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2013 01:09:53 -0500 (EST)
- Delivered-to: l-mathgroup@mail-archive0.wolfram.com
- Delivered-to: l-mathgroup@wolfram.com
- Delivered-to: mathgroup-newout@smc.vnet.net
- Delivered-to: mathgroup-newsend@smc.vnet.net
- References: <kcqkv4$lq5$1@smc.vnet.net> <kgc53j$gb8$1@smc.vnet.net>
On Saturday, February 23, 2013 9:31:47 PM UTC-7, Peter Klamser wrote: > Mathematica is complex software which uses Lisp like language as a > > base system. Except that the resemblance is superficial. Mathematica's expression evaluator is very different from a Lisp evaluator. > It is useless to open a Lisp interpreter and to try to > > emulate Mathematica, because you need 10^10 lines of code to provide > > Mathematica like results. Early versions of Mathematica were rather small: I remember that the upgrade to version 2 came on two floppies. For my purposes, even version 1 was more effective than the best-known Lisp-based system (I had used that previously). Of course, any software that's around for decades grows. C was first developed on minicomputers with a few MB of disk, but these days you need >1 GB of free space to compile gcc.