Re: Mathematical selection

Your point is perfectly valid, if you look at my earlier mail, I say:

"In order for the machine generated MathML to include mrows at the 
appropriate places, it would be necessary to pay attention to precedence 
rules. It strikes me that though many of these are fairly universal, we 
hit the usual ambiguity of presentation mathematics problem. Maybe this 
could be circumvented using configuration files of some sort."

this was the problem that I was suggesting could be circumvented by using 
some sort of configuration files, I am not aware however of any 
conventions/standards for the format of config files for stating these 
rules, maybe someone else has some experience here?

cheers,

Bill

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Richard Kaye wrote:

> 
> Actually, it is only clearly wrong with standard semantics where 
> + = addition and * = multiplication on some standard field such
> as the real numbers, and using standard conventions on precedence
> (and perhaps in a context where you are using standard classical
> logic to discuss real numbers).
> 
> I didn't see anywhere in the TeX or MathML that says that standard
> conventions should apply here. Admittedly p-MathML has an operator
> dictionary (which is not part of the normative spec) but even this
> just says 3 in <mn>3</mn> should be set as a number and
> that <mo>*</mo> and <mo>+</mo> should be in-fix operators with
> particular spacing round them.TeX does something similar. I don't 
> think it suggests precedence.
> 
> In fact "real" mathematicians rarely (perhaps never) use * for 
> multiplication and should be trained not to take precedence rules 
> for granted!
> 
> IMHO it would be quite wrong to apply some prejudged notions of 
> precidence where none are actually given.
> 
> Best wishes
> Richard

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-                  Dr. W.A. Naylor
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-                  http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~wn
-                  http://orcca.on.ca/~bill
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Received on Thursday, 30 March 2006 14:01:12 UTC