Re: Agenda for Monday April 1st

Hello, colleagues.

I'm Ron Whitney of AMS and have just recently come to know of
this list through Patrick Ion at Math Reviews and Dave Raggett.
Thanks to Dave for the invitation.

I've read certain of the postings to date and will take more time
to digest before joining in next Monday.  At the moment I'm
responding to a snippet of Nico's (hi, Nico!) recent message:

> 8. What about coding fractions: are we going to follow LaTeX
> and most SGML DTD's and use something like (fraction (numerator
> ...)  (denominator ...)) or are we copying the horrible TeX
> construct (... over ...)? I've been asked by people on the
> LaTeX3 development team to express a strong preference for the
> former, and a strong dislike for \over!

I'd like to hear more about why the infix notation in the case of
"over" is so disliked.  I do understand a dislike when the
construct is placed in a context heavily weighed in prefix
operators, but if we are to anticipate handling the usual +, -,
etc. in ways which include mapping them to operations on
preceding and following objects (which also must be parsed as
such), the case of "over" seems no more objectionable to me.
Even in a purely presentational realm, an amstex->amslatex filter
we're running naturally opens new streams at the various
potential left boundaries of \over, and it's easy to map the TeX
plain \over to an amslatex \frac.

I am genuinely asking for more information and not suggesting
I've decided the matter.  If our goals are phrased only in terms
which mention the existence of certain filters, we don't say
anything (much) about the grammar of the new html math language.
Or are there implicit constraints on the tools used for filtering?

I'll be happy to read further in previous discussion if someone
gives me a pointer.


-Ron