Re: fork in Lisp? was: Maxima servermode: stability of commands....



Hi Robert,

On May 10, 2006, at 8:42 PM, Robert Dodier wrote:

>
>> I guess what I am trying to say is that since it's not a human at the
>> other end, the communication needs to be terse and very predictable:
>> one input command produces one line of output.
>
> For your purposes, what format would make the least work for you
> once you get the response? Infix math notation? Lisp? TeX?
> MathML or other XML? Something else?

For my purposes, simple infix math notation would be best:

* I can feed that back into Maxima after some manipulations on my end
* LON-CAPA already includes routines to nicely print or display infix  
math (e.g., turn it into LaTeX, get equation images or symbol font  
renderings, MathML, PDFs, etc)

The simpler, the better. The client program can always turn the  
simple output into something fancier (like MathML or LaTeX), but it's  
hard the other way around.

Thanks so much for discussing this!

- Gerd.