Paul > since OpenMath offers the freedom of defining a new notation "easily" > ... > So a candid answer could be "just define a new symbol", e.g. an n-ary > equality symbol.
This is fine but it doies not address my fundamental question about the whole process. > > As with many parts of mathematics, exactly what is written with > > non-text symbols and what is written using natural language (or > > various mixtures, of course) is very arbitrary. > > > Jan's 'problem' is that he has to 'deal with' any notation that comes > > ... but (and this is the real > > strangeness) he is not expected to 'deal with' the many ideas > > (equally expressable as OpenMath symbols, operators etc.) ... > > that are always expressed purely in natural language, with no > > symbols needed (used). It is not clear to me why the current OpenMath CDs (OK, the ones I have seen) deal only `with notation' and not with those mathematical concepts that are abstractly equivalent to csymbols but are always (in standard maths) referred to by natural language expressions. Maybe this is only a problem for sets of CDs such as those from MathML that are generated, at least partially, by the needs of mathematics texts rather than Computer Algebra or programming. chris PS I also wrote: > > That this distinction is unnautural is well illustrated by the fact > > that spoken maths does not make any distinction (almost:-) between the > > two classes. which means that the generation of Content MathML from the 'natural spoken mathematical langauge' will be difficult unless everything typically spoken in a 'K14 mathematical paragraph' can be encoded. Hmmm, should I cross-post this. Or maybe just ask for 'real world' examples of documents containing 'useful Content MathML' and an explanation of its uses? _______________________________________________ Om3 mailing list [email protected] http://openmath.org/mailman/listinfo/om3
