[om] Re: [CfD] Proposal for a Standard Change

Richard Fateman fateman at cs.berkeley.edu
Tue Sep 24 17:42:06 CEST 2002


spelling

Michael Kohlhase wrote:

..
>>     OpenMath integers, floating point numbers, character strings,
>>     byearrays, applications, binding, attribuitions can also be encoded

                                           attributions


......
> the element with {\tt{id="foo"}}. So by transitivity, this element
> dominates itself, and by the acylcicity constraint, it is not the XML

                                 acyclicity

............

I suggest that you look at the wording for the common lisp reader/writer for
circular lists in the ANSI standard.


I see no reason for an OM object not to be able to dominate itself, if
I understand the document. I see lots of reasons to allow this. In 
particular,
I might actually want to encode an infinite expression.  Your concern is
probably that it could lead to difficulties in display. So fix
the display program. Lisp has a flag called something like *circle-print*.

Of course I could encode a cyclic graph by giving a table of node and
edges.  I could use the same encoding for an acyclic graph.  Oops, I
think I just made OM syntax unnecessary...

start node =1

node  content   attributes
1        plus    arith
2         x       etc
3         y

edges, ordered
(1: 2,3)

etc.

Regards,
RJF

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