Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m fairly certain that the difference between the approaches is that the f(x,y) function you mentioned requires limits to represent certain concepts while the eml approach is essentially a tree or a chain of computations meant to represent a model of a system.
Computing exp or ln is an infinite series, and vastly more compute. Hiding series behind a name doesn’t make them free to compute.
To represent something like sin(x) with f(x,y) requires infinite steps. Conversely, with eml you get an exact result in around 4 using identities and such.
One could argue that we do Taylor Series approximations on the hardware to represent trigonometric functions, but that highlights the key aspect of the eml approach. You can write a paper with those four steps that describes an exact model, here sin(x). And people can take that paper and optimize the result. This paper is about an auditable grammar that you can compute with.