Re: small samples

T. V. Raman wrote:
> 
> Pushing this approach too far really brings out the need to have extensibility
>  addressed. The concerns of having the ability to express semantics where
>  possible without tying down authors or the system is far better addressed
>  than trying to come up with a large collection of denoting different
>  "embellished" operators.

I would like to see more discussion on this topic as well.  I don't
remember seeing any responses to my last post on extensibility issues.

> Consider an author wishing to write a Legendre symbol legendre (p,q)
[...]
> Though you could come up with other markup for the Legendre symbol  and perhaps even
> embellish it in some way to provide semantics hints, the extension mechanism
> if present would make this and a plethora of other examples easy to handle:
> 
> To illustrate using TeX's extension mechanism:
> 
> \newcommand\legendre[2]{{#1\atop#2}}
> We denote by $\legendre{p}{q}$ ...

This is pretty much just what MINSE is trying to accomplish.  The only
differences are that

     a) you need to define "legendre" not just once, but once for each style;
and  b) the definitions go in a separate place to encourage reuse and thus
        consistent naming of semantics.

That's all, really.  The rest is the convenience of allowing us to write some
compounds as infix operators, plus more power (i.e. Python) so we can make
the compounds do whatever we want, not just substitution.


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