[om] OpenMath and Imaging / why not use MINSE?

[Richard Fateman]

Ka-Ping Yee wrote:

> 
> You may wish to have a look at the design strategies and the
> components of the system i designed in 1996 for rendering
> mathematics on the Web, completed long before OpenMath or MathML
> came on the scene.  
<sarcasm>
Why use old, working, technology, when one can rewrite everything
in the latest Java?  
This gives one the illusion of making great progress, even though
one is standing in the same place, or even retreating.  It also
means that one does not have to make progress in solving the hard
problems that were not previously solved.  (For example, I don't
know if MINSE solved the problem of displaying expressions that
were too wide for the given space. )  By re-writing the simpler
parts, one can ignore the hard parts.
</sarcasm>
For what it is worth, free display programs in LISP are available
in the "free" Macsyma.  These are ASCII display oriented, but
can be extended to arbitrary character sizes.  They also can
produce TeX.
Macsyma programs work for multiple-line displays of course.

Also, if you like the Mathematica ASCII display, a version of
that in LISP is in MockMMA, my free knock-off  of some of
Mathematica. It too is multiple-line, can do different character
sizes, and can be extended to new forms in an object-oriented way.
assuming there are tools for
 laying out glyphs on a canvas, this application should be
supportable in any number of ways.

But don't let me spoil your fun.  If you want to write another
program, go ahead.
RJF
www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman
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