On Sat, 30 Sep 2006 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Tamas K Papp writes: > > > In my experience, most people use CAS interactively: they encounter an > > integral or a PDE that's difficult to solve, so they type it into > > Mathematica (which frequently cannot solve it either, then you go > > crazy, numerical, or both ;-). It is more like a sophisticated > > symbolic calculator with a lot of patterns built in for manipulating > > expressions. > > I should have reacted earlier... > Please don't exaggerate with *opposing* CAS and Haskell, Prolog, or other > *universal* languages. CAS such as Maple, Mupad, and also Mathematica in > a sense are also universal, but they simply have > > * enormous libraries permitting to deal with symbolic expressions ; > * Pattern matching/rewriting contraptions useful to manipulate deeply > intricate structures. > > All this CAN BE DONE in Haskell as well, but reinventing the wheel is > rarely interesting (sometimes is, though) (*).
I think that "CAN BE DONE" is not the point, because everything can be done in assemb ... erm ... machine code. If I tell OOP people about the features of Haskell, they say, they can do the same in principle with their languages. The languages are all Turing-complete, but this statement is as useful as the observation "a line segment contains as many points as a filled square" for measuring lengths and areas. On the other hand, since we have clarified that language generations are a marketing issue, I will not defend this classification scheme or any classification with it. If at all, we should respect that Haskell is a class of its own. ;-) _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
