[Om3] CD-review little report

[Stan Devitt]

Paul,

My point is this.

I wish to write a web page for my first year calculus class using the notation int f.
It may be that I want to compare different formal definitions of that notation.  It may be that I simply want to use one particular definition.  In either case, I need one or more content expressions (mapped to appropriate definitions, of course).

In each case "presentation" is not enough.  I actually want to use the notation and
I want to be able to compute with it.  (For a particular interpretation it can be made rigourous.)

If you deprecate that content notation, then I will not be able to do that.  

A primary role of MathML is to "facilitate" such discourse by both machine and human interfaces.  Every time we rule out a common notation by saying (in effect)"... My life would be much easier if you wrote it my preferred way" we have missed the mark - at least for common notations K-14.

This particular notation is a legitimate and common  notation for both computation and presentation.  It has been allowed for a considerable time. What could possibly be the rationale for deprecating it?  

(It is not good enough for us to say that the current content dictionaries for OpenMath have not yet introduced it and we don't have time to extend them.)

Stan


-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Libbrecht [mailto:paul at activemath.org] 
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2008 9:52 AM
To: Stan Devitt; OM3 Mailing list; Math Working Group WG
Subject: Re: CD-review little report

Stan,

are you asking me why I removed the text-formulæ? It seems so but I am not sure.

If yes I can easily answer:
The formula int f  below is a perfect example: I would always have understood it, until having encountered Maple's syntax (which might well never happens in today's users' life), as being the integer part of f... (that was called floor(f) in some syntaxes, but we were talking about calculus weren't we?).

Linear syntax is ambiguous, this is well known. It can be very practical in a presentation but either in context (almost impossible in CD-presentations I feel) or with extra support for disambiguation (different modalities of display, disambiguation of symbols' meanings, term highlighting...).

paul


Le 18-sept.-08 à 16:08, Stan Devitt a écrit :
> I am puzzled.   Have you not seen things like  int f + int g =  int  
> f +
> g  in K-14 ?
> Is this not a case of unary Int ?
> Why would we deprecate such a functionality from content math ?
>
> I am probably missing something here.  My apologies but I simply do 
> not have the band witdh To dive in more deeply right now, but this 
> caught my eye.
>
> Stan
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: member-math-request at w3.org [mailto:member-math-request at w3.org]
> On
> Behalf Of Paul Libbrecht
> Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2008 2:45 PM
> To: Math Working Group WG; om3 at openmath.org
> Subject: CD-review little report
>
> Hello CD-friends,
>
> I tried a to review the current OpenMath3 CDs under the spirit of:
> - making sure a simple description is there within the Description 
> element
> - making sufficient examples are MathML-compatible
>
>
>
> - limit1
>   - limits: I did not touch any example thus far, we are not yet clear 
> about the condition element I'm afraid but I see James has started to 
> select examples using MML examples... but I don't see this in the 
> output. Also they seem to be speaking to different languages.
> Is this a current work of James?
>   - removed unary in limits1/limit... it doesn't seem strictly 
> necessary (and is rather not k14)
>   - I have rephrased "takes no argument" to "cannot be applied"
>
>  more comments in there as XML comments... we're missing ednote in 
> here, sharply!
> Is it working somewhere? In which fields?
>
> - calculus1:
>   - same for unary
>   - added some chosen properties... not sure the OpenMath will survive 
> into the MathML-spec
>   - tried to make sure there's a word description for any property or 
> example. I wonder if the "linear syntax" is something we should keep 
> here (but it could be generated!)
> - I stopped before integrals
>
>
> thanks
>
> paul