AW: Re: Using content-MathML for computation and analysis in Science and Engineering

As I pointed out to Peter offline, bindings become very intuitive when used in a syntax like 

Let x =... . Then. ...

Or

… where x=…

A fundamental property of MathML is that nobody writes it by hand. For most forms of lambda, syntactic sugar removes all the dread, as we demonstrated amply in the WebALT project.

-------- Original message --------
Subject: Re: Using content-MathML for computation and analysis in Science and Engineering 
From: Paul Libbrecht <paul@hoplahup.net> 
To: Andreas Strotmann <andreas.strotmann@gmail.com> 
CC: Bruce Miller <bruce.miller@nist.gov>,"www-math@w3.org" <www-math@w3.org>,Daniel Marques <dani@wiris.com>,Peter Murray-Rust <pm286@cam.ac.uk> 


Le 20 mars 2012 à 08:12, Andreas Strotmann a écrit :
More to the point, a sequence of assignments would therefore 'naturally' be expressed as nested lambda expressions in MathML to preserve semantics.


My personal opinion, as a mathematician, is that this way of writing might be well-founded in terms of expressivity or logic, it remains fully opaque to most mathematicians except logicians.

The concept of binding is understandable, and even that of mapping, but having to enter everything within lambda terms tends to be a real readability problem.

paul