On Wed, 9 Aug 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> An interesting point. This suggests that the mathematicians need to pay a
> bit more attention to the text-formatting community, and in particular to
> the difference between procedural markup and descriptive markup..
>
> "Mathematicians"? Which ones?
The ones pushing this proposal.
> What is wanted is not a way of saying "Fraktur Lowercase C", but a way of
> saying "Lie Algebra Lowercase C"...
>
> What you say seems obvious. Still, I am not sure I agree.
> (i) The number of mathematical concepts is very large, several millions
> I suppose, and moreover grows very quickly.
Indeed so; such a notation would have to be extensible... but then, any
good descriptive markup language already is. Part of the task of getting
a paper formatted (printed, etc.) would be to review the specific concepts
used and assign formatting conventions to any that are sufficiently rare
not to have defaults. A suggested set of such conventions might even be
part of the usual markup, *accompanying* (not interspersed within!) the
actual text of the paper.
> It is not like markup
> in a typesetting environment, where a few hundred labels like <titlepage>,
> <chapter>, <table> suffice.
You've obviously never typeset modern poetry. :-) :-)
> (ii) Mathematics tends to choose a notation that is as compact as possible
> and as readable as possible. That means that things that are variable in
> principle but constant in a given context are not specified.
> Thus, going from complete markup to the desired output is AI-complete.
Again, there is no requirement that typesetting systems always be able to
intuit everything, without help from the author or the composer. The
important thing is to think in terms of descriptive markup *plus* a
description of the mapping between that and the desired output, so the
two are kept distinct.
Henry Spencer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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