[om] Concatenation of lists ??

[Andrew Solomon]

On Fri, May 04, 2001 at 02:57:07PM -0400, Michael Kohlhase wrote:
> your assessment of the situation is very much driven by your experience of
> writing phrasebooks for computer algebra systems, and I agree with you that
> something like this is needed for this application.
> 
> This is not the only use of OpenMath. In the theorem proving applications,
> we do not need phrasebooks, since we do not implement the mathematical
> objects represented symbols in software, but reason about them in software
> systems. In this application, the content dictionaries and their symbols
> are much lighter-weight objects, they can be created, experimented with,
> revised, and later at some point stablilized to a formal theory. 

The OpenMath community is already small enough and there is no need to
subdivide it further.  If you want to play fast and loose with CD symbols
you should do it in private CDs. A "lightweight" process will produce 
"lightweight" CDs, bringing into question the credibility of the enterprise. 

> I think that there is a fundamental issue in the use of (and the intuition
> about) CDs that we should discuss. I think that we should not restrict our
> attention (and the infrastructure/procedures) to one of the uses of CDs.

I don't think that my proposed process is too heavy for any part of 
our community. Moreover, extensively discussing CDs on the list
will help us to understand each other's motivations. 

Rather than argue in the abstract, I will kick off this process 
by posting my symbols to the list and we'll see how it fares.

Best wishes,

Andrew
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