Re: something to chat about, lisp and Mathematica for list processing.

Nasser Abbasi wrote:
"Widely recognized as the world's most powerful list manipulation
language, Mathematica ..."

LOL. :-)

Topic for discussion: From only the list processing/manipulation point of
view, and nothing else, what would you consider the
advantages/disadvantages of one over the other?

There are several useful/essential features for list processing:

1. Performance.
2. Well-defined performance.
3. Pattern matching.
4. Tail recursion.

1. Mathematica is very slow.
2. Mathematica doesn't define the performance of most of its operators. Lisp
is slow due to dynamic typing.
3. Lisp doesn't bundle pattern matching and most Lisp implementations of
pattern matchers suck.
4. Neither Lisp nor Mathematica make sufficient assurances about tail
recursion.

So I'd say both languages were quite poor for list processing. I'd recommend
Scheme, Haskell, OCaml or Standard ML.

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
OCaml for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/?usenet
.

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