[Om3] binary vs n-ary relations

[Paul Libbrecht]

Chris,

since OpenMath offers the freedom of defining a new notation "easily"  
it has been a common choice to offer that extra symbol to match any  
given new notation.

The whole infrastructure of formal properties in content-dictionaries  
is in principle supportive for this: it can enable processors to read  
CDs and deal with such new symbol. But experimental evidence of such  
is lacking (probably as complexity can be daunting).

So a candid answer could be "just define a new symbol", e.g. an n-ary  
equality symbol.

In practice, however, the long-term maintenance of CDs is rather a  
more difficult work (trying to not break compatibility).

paul

Le 29-sept.-08 à 00:47, Chris Rowley a écrit :

> As with many parts of mathematics, exactly what is written with
> non-text symbols and what is written using natural language (or
> various mixtures, of course) is very arbitrary.  It varies from
> (mathematical) culture to culture and over time.  Also, the range of
> symbols and constructions available varies.
>
> Jan's 'problem' is that he has to 'deal with' any notation that comes
> from a particular culture right now; but (and this is the real
> strangeness) he is not expected to 'deal with' the many ideas
> (expressable as OpenMath symbols, operators etc.) from that same
> culture that are always expressed purely in natural language, no
> symbols needed (used).
>
> That this distinction is unnautural is well illustrated by the fact
> that spoken maths does not make any distinction (almost:-) between the
> two classes.

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