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by uonpopular_th 1211 days ago
>Needs a timeframe and context. Back in the, say, 1990s or maybe even early 2000s, when the modern world was just forming and the only languages students would work in were C and C++, maybe with some Bash and Perl on the side, 25k lines is a reasonable estimate for a brand new symbolic engine- a thing that in imperative languages didn't exist- with some element of typical PhD edge case over-engineering.

The modern world was very much formed by the 90s. Mathematica, Axiom, Maple, etc were all mature software written a decade or more ago. What people were doing wasn't writing a CAS from scratch but writing one that could slot into whatever program they needed at the time, e.g. chaotic simulation of the solar system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_o...