[larodi]

Sorry, perhaps, a dumb question:

Is it not that Mathematica, and most of the Wolfram innovation, is about a smart way of applying some rule-based inference. I think of it as parametrized PROLOG rules, with large lib. So term rewriting all the way to the end, correct me if I'm wrong.

Where does the mini-core+JIT come into this?

Thanks for taking time to answer.

[Hendrikto]

The interpreter / JIT is the one actually applying the rules.

[larodi]

So it is the tokenizer, and rule expansion, that gets JIT'd, right? I mean - there's no some secondary process running on top of the rule expansion?