Re: inference rule markup in W3C specs?

>MathML supports implication, and the difference between an implication
>and an inference rule is quite smooth (it is most a matter of notation).

That is rather a debatable claim, in general. And even if you do 
write them as implications, you need something like modus ponens to 
actually use the implications.

>If you strongly plea for having a specific markup for inference rules,
>I guess the issue could be considered inside MathML.
>Since we have MathML, it would be nice to be able to use it wherever
>it makes sense (i.e. in every context where you need some mathematical
>content).
>More generally, the MathML WG is becoming sensible to the problem
>of extending the content language beyond the K12 fragment.
>My only fear, in this case, is that the "intended domain" is not
>so clear to suggest a sufficiently standard and uniform content markup.

There are some very general-purpose notions of 'inference rule' 
floating about.  The basic idea is that one wants to be able to write 
expressions that 'match' some other expressions based on syntactic 
criteria and then rearrange some of the matched parts into a new 
well-formed expression. In an ideal world this could be stated in 
terms of the abstract syntactic categories involved, but that might 
be a little too much to ask.

>Do you have a clear idea of what you need? For instance, what
>kind of datatypes would you like to consider? Would you like
>to work in a typed or an untyped formal setting? etc. etc.

I would say, all the above. Is that impractical?

Pat Hayes
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Received on Wednesday, 17 April 2002 20:43:13 UTC