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0 pointsbrudgers9y ago0 comments

Or post a clickable link here in the thread? Explaining the code might be an opportunity to create a rough draft of something more polished. A bit of background on Maude might be nice too. Save readers from Googling and maybe help people understand why it was used. All things that tend to be "intellectually interesting."

Anyway, I was a bit philosophically torn since the content tends toward mathematical/algorithmic and made me wonder what does it mean to play around with mathematics/algorithms?

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pschanely9y ago

Totally; great point. My code is here: https://github.com/pschanely/wf-optimizer/blob/master/demo.m...

Maude is a programming language based on rewriting: http://maude.cs.illinois.edu/w/index.php

It's pretty wild; your code doesn't "execute" in the traditional sense; instead patterns match the code and transform it repeatedly until it reaches a "normal form" - one that cannot be rewritten further.

Maude is handy for playing with optimizers, because you very often want to specify behavior in terms of patterns (when you see these functions together, replace them with this...)

gmfawcett9y ago

I hadn't heard of Maude before, thanks! For those interested in this kind of thing, another well-known term-rewriting language is Pure (http://purelang.bitbucket.org/), which grew out of an earlier project called Q (http://q-lang.sourceforge.net/).

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