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Re: pattern matching in LaTeX

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Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:34:28 +0100

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 Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > not being a mathematician, i am not sure how to comment on this. i had > just assumed that publishing "logical" math is a Good Thing I guess the problem is not whether math is logical, but that published math contains a lot of omissions or jumps which people who work in the field know how to fill in. This is a necessary mechanism for optimal human-to-human communication. > > ones that drive mathematical innovation. Thus, having data formats > > which are optimized for presentation, and others which are optimized for > > machine processing of the logical content is, > i take the point that you need both, that we cannot get rid of > presentation math, because it performs a valuable function. but for > the *default*, low-class, mass-market math, surely you'd agree that > content markup is desirable? surely school textbook math should have > not have \hspace s in? Absolutely. I guess on this level things are, at least in principle, taken care of by LaTeX, so I assume we are talking about one step further: That, at present, I cannot take a piece of LaTeX code, read it unambiguously into Mathematica and work with it. (I am using this just as an example because I am most familiar with the two, but I guess everybody can replace these by their favorite systems...) Marcel