Re: Math with and without MathML

Patrick Ion wrote:
>
> I welcome your comment that your interest in MathML is largely
> because it is embedded in CellML.  CellML does seem to have quite
> wide support.  I've wondered for some time what difficulties users
> of CellML may have found with aspects of MathML, and if there are
> suggestions from that user community that can be used to improve
> MathML as it goes toward a new revision (the WG that can write
> such a revision has just ben chartered).  I'd say you should feel
> free to comment, and to ask others using CellML to do the same.

Thanks for the encouragement.

I'm currently fighting on several fronts simultaneously because I want my
simulation platform to be useable in several different domains (cognitive
science, computational biology, artificial societies and anything else
that looks like a network), so I'm pushing the envelope with a toothpick
for the time being.

But since it looks like I'm going to want to roll my own symbolic
computation engine for content MathML in any event, and since I'll need it
for not only the CellML interface but also for at least one of the
artificial society applications for which an interest has been expressed,
you'll probably see the sparse effects of my toothpick on this list sooner
rather than later. :)


> Some great advantages of starting again from scratch will need to be
> more explicitly demonstrated for me personally to be inclined to do so.

Absolutely. I've been a rabid evangelist for standards throughout my
career, to the point of turning down work in an Oracle shop that wanted
every last proprietary nuance to be exploited. Simplistic as it sounds, a
standard is a standard until it's obsoleted by a different standard.
That's what a standard *is*. Yes, we're "stuck" with MathML and its
successors for now, just as we're "stuck" with SQL (which has 1970's
written all over it) for now. But I'm too busy using MathML and SQL for
what they're good at to spend time dreaming up the next paradigm shift for
either.


-- Mark

Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX

Received on Saturday, 15 July 2006 17:19:46 UTC