On 5/7/07, Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> This is because the pattern-matcher works strictly left-to-right, doing no
> backtracking.
Maybe this is a design decision that we could revisit.
Maybe somehow we could adapt algorithms applied to regular
expressions for strings. Just daydreaming at this point.
> making sure that the third rewrite happened last and that it didn't get you
> into an infinite loop -- perhaps with simpfuncall.
As it happens, tellsimpafter (but not tellsimp) constructs rules
which observe a special variable *AFTERFLAG, which, I believe,
is supposed to avoid looping in simplification. Could be wrong
about that.
FWIW
Robert