On 12/5/07, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote: > ... > for one thing, the parser still expects a stream of characters -- > no amount of leading whitespace will change that.
I agree. Conventional parsers process a "1-dimensional" stream of characters. Something that is more than 1-dimensional can be serialized so that it can be processed by such a parser. > It won't accept the ascii-art output of Axiom as valid input. > A parser *could* be designed to accept this as valid input although I am not suggesting that it should. Such artwork is too difficult in general for the user generate. But there are simplified "ascii-art" languages that can be compiled into LaTeX and there are 2-d page layout languages that are common in wiki websites (e.g. reStructuredText) that are compiled into HTML. Both of these should be considered serializations that could in principle be re-rendered as the original input. Handwriting as an input form for computers is fairly popular goal and is available for example in the Maple user interface. Such handwriting is certainly 2-dimensional, no? Regards, Bill Page. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: The Future of Linux Business White Paper from Novell. From the desktop to the data center, Linux is going mainstream. Let it simplify your IT future. http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/8857-50307-18918-4 _______________________________________________ open-axiom-devel mailing list open-axiom-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/open-axiom-devel
