[Om3] Being pragmatic about the semantics of, eg, variables and functions

[David Carlisle]

> OK - and there are two levels of consistency. By 'intcond', I meant what
> was option 3 in the binders paper, i.e. a gluing symbol

ah, sorry yes OK.


> So the "official" P->S will be frozen at the same time?

yes the whole point of the pragmatic->strict stuff that it is in (and in
many ways forms the bulk of) the specification of Content MathML in
Chapter 4. This was thought to be preferable to the OM2 situation where
we _said_ that OM2 and MML2 were aligned but the description of the
alignment was in a pdf note on the OM site, with no official standing.
In MathML3 the idea was to make it part of the specification. That has
advantages and disdvantages as you see...

> Irrespective of this particular issue, that would be a pity, as there are
> currently, as I see it, bits of potential pragmatic (with no current use
> cases) that I, at least,do not understand.

The specifcation in the current text is in words not as runnable code
the plan is to fill in some of the gaps to make it as defined as
possible but given the flexibility of mathml markup if you combine
things in interesting ways there are likely to be  still cases where the
mapping to strict is underdefined. It may be that that gives you enough
room for manoeuvre, or not?  However we don't want to leave too much of
the mapping from pragmatic to strict undefined as that negates the whole
point of the restructuring of chapter4, where the intention is to 

a) say via schema what's legal as mathml
b) say by mapping to strict mathml (aka openmath in mathml synax) what
   those constructs "mean".

so wherever we leave the mapping to strict undefined we are saying that
some construct is legal mathml but has no defined meaning. Clearly we
don't want to do that too often.

David




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