Maybe some work to make Maxima display much better

--- Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> Andrey G. Grozin wrote:
> > I can try to write MathML generation in Maxima patterned after
LaTeX
> > generation. It would be useful anyway.
> 
> I quite disagree.  In fact, the semantics or the syntactic appearance

> for typeset mathematics in MathML is, so far as I can tell,  not 
> formally specified, and for LaTeX there is deliberately no semantics 
> associated with the appearance so that $AB$  could be A*B  or matrix 
> multiply AB or a symbol AB.   and $A^(4)$ could mean the 4th
> derivative.  Or something else.   For Maxima, the meaning of any
utterance is what
> it  means to Maxima, which is operationally defined, and is entirely
> formal in the sense of computation. You might not like that
computation, but
> it > is formally expressed in the program.  MathML is expressed in
some 
> slipperly natural language. On top of that it is about 20 times more 
> verbose.
> 
> I think that it may be politically the right thing to use MathML, and
> relatively easy to make MathML using the same style as the
> mactex.lisp  program, but from a technical standpoint I think that
MathML offers
> very  little, at least if you are using it for Maxima <--> Maxima
front
> end.  If you make Maxima front ends out of browsers, then there would
be
> a possible motive.

Well, that's sort of a motive - that, and taking advantage of what has
already 
been done in the department of display libraries.  At some point maybe
we
can add the ability to MathView to handle TeX, which would probably sit
much better in many quarters, but the idea of easy display of Maxima
notebooks
on the web is not to be taken lightly - my personal opinion is that
such an 
ability will appeal to a lot of people.


> In the interests of not building towers, I would still prefer taking
> whatever is written (say in Python!) and writing it it lisp so that
> we have Maxima  (in lisp)  generating a picture-language that is
> nothing more than a glyph/position collection  (and maybe even
> plotting,  too?)  talking to a very simple and OS/machine 
> independent display.  Maybe even a postscript interpreter.

I agree this is attractive, but it has several practical drawbacks,
not the least of which is we would have to maintain everything
ourselves.  Can you give us a rough idea of the problems we would
have to tackle and solve before this could become a practical 
solution?

CY


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