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The Basis of Wolfram Language

10 points by jshaqaw ↗ HN
I see lots of claims out of Wolfram Research about the amazing foundations of Wolfram Language but not actual details. Is anyone familiar with the internal structure of the language. Is it built around a small number of dominant ideas like Lisp/Forth and if so what are they? Are there base language primitives coded in another low level language?

No particular need for this info. I’m just curious.

5 comments

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7thaccount
I answered this in an old post. It is built off of a TRS (term rewriting system). This video shows the fundamentals of the language (like the internals, not how to plot).

https://youtu.be/H-rnezxOCA8

jshaqaw
Perfect, thanks
7thaccount
No problem. I've been using Mathematica off and on for a few years. It's a powerful language/tool, and a lot more than people realize. You can do some crazy stuff with just a few one liners.
rotifer
I don't know anything about Wolfram Language, but Stephen Diehl's "Exotic Programming Ideas: Part 2 (Term Rewriting)" [0] says it's based on a term rewriting system.

The blog post describes term rewriting systems using Wolfram Language in its examples.

[0] https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/exotic02.html