> On 05/21/2001 at 11:20 PM, Lars Hellström <[log in to unmask]> > wrote: > > >At least about this aspect of it we can do something. The guidance given > >by LaTeX manuals and the like on what is sensible and what is not is, in > >this area, rather important. > > It may be important to LaTeX designers, but it is totally irrelevant to > working mathematicians, who will use whatever symbols they deem > appropriate with no deference to anyone else's notions of propriety. > Collaborations have been known to spend more time arguing about notation > than proving theorems. the great thing about a markup language like latex is that you can define a macro \thing, and each collaborator can use his/her own representation of \thing. what's more, at publication time, you may find that some other group has cornered the market in the representation of the object you defined as \thing, and you can _all_ change to the now "generally accepted" version. semantic markup works: i commend it to you all... (i first learnt of set notation from reading whitehead and russell in my spare time at school. they used (as it were) \epsilon for set membership; if they'd been marking up using (la)tex they could easily have used their own \belongs which they would have defined as a mathop variant of \epsilon, but we would redefine for the 2001 edition (!) as \in or whatever.) in short, i don't think latex actually _needs_ to descend to the level of the mathematicians' squabbles about notation: latex markup can deal with more-or-less anything. the unicode bods _do_ exist at that level, though. fortunately we merrily sail along at a far higher level. r