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From: "Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma@12000.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Practicalities of Ada for app development
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2012 19:37:41 -0500
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Date: 2012-06-10T19:37:41-05:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

On 6/10/2012 2:47 PM, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

>It is not worth the efforts to bother about that,
> because, as I said, patterns is a bad idea in general.
>

Hello Dmitry;

Have not followed the whole discussion here. But I just
wanted to mention on the above, is that Mathematica is based
on just this concept. Patterns.  It is really a pattern
replacement language at its core.

For example, in Mathematica, when I define a function

f[x_] := x^2

x_ above means the pattern x.  On the right side, the
pattern named x is replaced by x raised to 2. That is
all what Mathematica does.

When no more pattern matching replacement can be done, the final
resulting expression is evaluated and the result returned.

Hence f[2] returns 2^2 which evaluates to 4 while
f["micky mouse"] returns micky mouse^2

My point is pattern based languages can be very powerful,
Mathematica is an example, may be the issue is implementation
and such. So what works fine in Mathematica, might not work for Ada
due to basic design of the language and I think your point
about  "bad in general" refer to some context which I missed
because I did not follow the whole thread, I just jumped in here :)

--Nasser