[om] OpenMath and Imaging

[Ka-Ping Yee]

On Tue, 28 Sep 1999, Michael Kohlhase wrote:
> My problem is to write an XSL rule that can do the following: 
> 
> from
> 
> <OMA>
>   <OMS cd="cartesian-products" name="pair"/>
>   <OMV name="a"/>
>   <OMV name="b"/>
> </OMA>
> 
> generate (a,b). The problem here is that the dominance structure of the
> trees is not preserved. I have tried 
> 
> <xsl:template match='OMA/OMS[@cd="cartesian-products" and @name="pair"]'>
>   (<xsl:value-of select="following-sibling"/>,<xsl:value-of select="following-sibling"/>)
> </xsl:template>
> 
> but of course this does not work. The problem is that when you are working
> on the OMA element, you have to do different things based on the choice of
> the function symbol.

If i understand correctly your problem is that you can't express
enough power in XSL to do different things for different compounds.

With MINSE this is trivial because the stylesheets are implemented
in Python.  Using an appropriate notation definition, you would only
have to enter
    
    'pair(a, b)

to get exactly the same semantics as the above five lines of XML,
and it could be transformed into a rendering like

    (a,b)

by the stylesheet.

Also, Python is a heckuva lot easier to write than XSL:

    def _2pair(self, pl, A, B):
        return "@paren(" + xf(99, A) + "@," + xf(99, B) + ")"

With all this "following-sibling" stuff, doesn't it seem that we are
regressing to a prehistoric stage before we learned in first-year
computer science (or earlier) that functions could have arguments?



-- ?!ng

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