[Om] Multistep "equation" symbol?

[Professor James Davenport]

On Wed, May 13, 2009 11:20 pm, David Carlisle wrote:
[quoting Michael]
>> Then this could be something like
>> @(M,R,a_0,a_1,\ldots,a_n) = @(and,@(R,a_0,a_1),@(M,R,a_1,\ldots,a_n))
>
> with one syntactic variation, if I read this right it's the same as the
> predicate_on_list symbol proposed to be added as part of the support for
> MathML3, (obviously the idea is in the air...)  see
>
> I think that essentially the only difference  is that rather than being
> cast as an n-ary operator redicate_on_list cast as a binary one taking
> an explict list as second argument, so in the above notation the usage is
>
> @(M,R,@(list,a_0,a_1,\ldots,a_n))
>
> Having the explict list constructor there makes it slightly more verbose
> but avoids the problem Michael alluded to that it's hard to  to
> decompose an n-ary constructor to talk about the individual arguments
> but a list arguent can be deconstructed with symbols from the list Cd to
> refer to (say) the kth item, even if the items are not listed explitly.
David's solution is therefore "more OpenMath", but I think we still need
to discuss the wider issue of deconstructing such things in FMPs, but if
we can discuss in parallel, so much the better.

James Davenport
Visiting Full Professor, University of Waterloo
Otherwise:
Hebron & Medlock Professor of Information Technology and
Chairman, Powerful Computing WP, University of Bath
OpenMath Content Dictionary Editor and Programme Chair, OpenMath 2009
IMU Committee on Electronic Information and Communication