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Re: Mathematica and Lisp

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg129504] Re: Mathematica and Lisp
• From: John Doty <noqsiaerospace at gmail.com>
• Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:54:33 -0500 (EST)
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On Wednesday, January 16, 2013 9:15:18 PM UTC-7, Richard Fateman wrote:

> 
> If you want a term rewriting system, several of them (free, open source) 
> 
> have been written in Lisp.  Anything that Mathematica can
> 
> do computationally can be done, in principle, with any "Turing equivalent"
> 
> programming language, and that includes Lisp.

Sure. You can write a term rewriting system in Cobol if you wish. But then, if you use it to write programs, you're no longer programming in Cobol.

 
> > f_[whoCalled]^:=f
> 
> > Sin[whoCalled]
> 
> 
> 
> Certainly such a feature could be implemented in a pattern-matching 
> 
> system written in Lisp.

But it's not a native construction in Lisp.

>  Since most lisp implementations provide
> 
> many "introspective" features including examining the run-time call 
> 
> stack, I think it would be possible to extract "who called me" from
> 
> this information of the (complete) call stack.

But you're missing the point: Mathematica does this kind of thing naturally as a consequence of its design. Lisp does not.

> > which yields
> 
> >
> 
> > Sin