The matcher does not backtrack at all.
There is one that does, in the integration package
but it is not available except from lisp.
There are other possibilities (e.g. a Mathematica-style
pattern matcher in Lisp) but that would need a lot more syntactic
mechanism for the user.
RJF
Stavros Macrakis wrote:
>>if you have a rule like e*f(x)*g(y), then it could try to match
>>3*f(4)*g(5) by matching
>>e= 3*f(4) and then failing.
>>
>>You don't want e to match "anything at all". You want e to match
>>something not involving any f( ..).
>>
>>
>
>Sure, it might try matching e=3*f(4) to start, but when it fails, it
>had better backtrack and try e=3. If it doesn't, that seems like a
>bug.
>
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