Thanks for the reference to Maude, I wasn't aware of it.
Certainly there is similarity to Maude, in that both Maude and LastCalc are programmed through term rewriting. However in other respects they are very different, both in purpose and implementation.
Maude looks to be an academic research language. LastCalc is designed to be used by anyone, and can be used as a teaching language. I've used it to teach my girlfriend, who had no prior programming experience, how to write simple recursive methods.
The biggest algorithmic difference with Maude is that LastCalc has a backtracking parse engine.
Here is an example of how this works:
x=12 pounds
x in usd (result: US$19.9522)
x in kg (result: 5.4431 kilograms)
Note how the interpretation of x is different depending on what makes sense within the wider context. To the best of my knowledge this is fairly unique (I'm sure Google Calculator does something similar, but it's not user-extensible).
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 23.9 ms ] threadCertainly there is similarity to Maude, in that both Maude and LastCalc are programmed through term rewriting. However in other respects they are very different, both in purpose and implementation.
Maude looks to be an academic research language. LastCalc is designed to be used by anyone, and can be used as a teaching language. I've used it to teach my girlfriend, who had no prior programming experience, how to write simple recursive methods.
The biggest algorithmic difference with Maude is that LastCalc has a backtracking parse engine.
Here is an example of how this works:
Note how the interpretation of x is different depending on what makes sense within the wider context. To the best of my knowledge this is fairly unique (I'm sure Google Calculator does something similar, but it's not user-extensible).