Maybe some work to make Maxima display much better

Hello *,

On Wed, 12 Dec 2001, Richard Fateman wrote:
> 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 quite disagree. Maxima language has a well-defined *mathematical*
semantics, but no *typesetting* semantics. LaTeX has a well-defined
typesetting semantics, and no mathematical semantics. MathML has
typesetting semantics, and a little bit of mathematical semantics.

If somebody would like to use Maxima as a typesetting language, it will
have to be enhanced by a lot of markup stuff. Why create a new LaTeX, when
LaTeX works so wonderfully?

> 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.
The answer is: Display GhostScript. GhostScript is an excellent PostScript
interpreter; Display GhostScript incorporates Display enhancements, which
were designed by NeXT in order to make PostScript viable as a means of
communication between applications and display.

Andrey