Re: Choosing a parser for Mathematica input

Hi, comp.compiler guys.
    I came across this thread while googling for something I wrote;
found this thread with stuff written about me.. It's a bit stale but
if David Kirby wants a Mathematica clone, he should look at Mathics.
Regarding the difficult of parsing the Mathematica language, he misses
the point, I think. By the way, after conducting a worldwide search
for a better name for the language-minus-the-math-library, Stephen
Wolfram chose, tada, "The Wolfram Language".


Anyway the difficulty isn't parsing x //f to get f(x). It is in the
separation of lexical and syntactic uses of characters like "." which have
multiple uses.
a.3 is Dot[a,3]. a .3 is Times[0.3, a]. And the difficulty with using
"space"
or merely adjacency for multiplication is not resolved by asserting that
mathematicians use it all the time.


I have written papers and email in which I am critical of Mathematica.
  I have also written programs that are partial implementations of that program
but with illustrative changes showing (in my view) better design decisions.
Some of these decisions are mathematical rather than language issues.


Being (threatened or actually) sued by Wolfram is not so unusual. It does add
some perspective to the fellow. See for example,


http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/


oh, about the name for the language, see
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/sage-devel/egofart/sage-devel/VEVW
bpDLc_g/cI0iIhIk7-AJ
for my own acronymic juggling, which explains the name EGOFART.

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