[om] OpenMath and Imaging

[Richard Fateman]

David Carlisle wrote:
> 
>
>  Most Mathematica users are going
> to input expressions as they always did, but if they save them as MathMl
> (today) or Om (one day?) they will also be able to share that
> mathematics with web browsers, rival systems such as Axiom or Maple or
> Reduce, users of MS Word, etc.

Actually, sharing will be severely restricted: to the intersection of
all of those representation capabilities. This probably excludes all
programming constructs, and even some built-in math functions.
It is not too hard to take FullForm of a "purely mathematical"
expression in Mathematica and (writing in Mathematica) spew out
an equivalent in some other language.  E.g. mathematica to lisp
takes about 10 lines of code.

Take your favorite textbook or table of integrals and see
how much of that can be typed in to Mathematica and via
MathML transmitted to Maple.  Indexing info? side-conditions?
provenance?

The argument that all CAS will talk to each other in the future is
probably
not so convincing:   There are really very
few  CAS and in the (somewhat unlikely) case that you really
want to communicate between 2 of them, it is probably because
they don't share some capability and you will have to program
some special translation mechanisms.

But then I seem to be in a skeptical mood.

 Richard Fateman
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