ChapterZero

I found a Mathematica grammar finally: in an appendix of the Mathematica Book. The section, “Some General Notations and Conventions”, is where the very important table of precedences is, but the other material looks useful also. I did some reading up on the pattern matching system, and was unpleasantly surprised to find that the way I proposed earlier is not nearly powerful enough, as it stands— Mathematica’s pattern matching system can best be described as a regular expression engine that works with mathematica’s data structures. After seeing that a simple integration system can be written using simply the pattern matching system, I’m starting to wonder exactly how much of Mathematica’s internals are written to take advantage specifically of the pattern matcher. I’m going to have so much fun trying to implement this…