At the core of
Mathematica's symbolic programming paradigm is the concept of transformation rules for arbitrary symbolic patterns.
Mathematica's pattern language conveniently describes a very general set of classes of expressions, making possible uniquely readable, elegant and efficient programs.
lhs→rhs (
Rule)
— representation of replacement rule
expr/.rules (
ReplaceAll)
— apply replacement rules to an expression
Cases — elements of a list or expression matching a given pattern
lhs=rhs,
lhs:=rhs — make assignments for arbitrary patterns
