Re: Mathematical selection

It is true that "*" (or ⁢) and "+" can have any meaning, airity, grouping, or precedence the author desires.  However, in the "real world", people don't do that because everyone knows their relative precedences, knows that they are binary operators, etc.,  and using them in a different way would just confuse people.  I like to think of it as mathematical Darwinism :-)
 
The point of the operator dictionary was to save implementers time in figuring out the default relative precedences, airity, and display properties of operators.  The dictionary needs updating (it didn't get updated for Unicode 3.2's massive additions), but is still useful.
 
Even if the MathML that was generated didn't include mrows, there is nothing in the spec that says that an application that allows selection can't implicitly add mrows so that the selection is restricted to mathematically sensible subtrees... assuming that is desirable.
 
 
 
Neil Soiffer
Senior Scientist
Design Science, Inc.
neils@dessci.com <mailto:neils@dessci.com> 
www.dessci.com <http://www.dessci.com> 
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