Re: Technical reasons for some options taken on design of MathML

Bruce Miller wrote:
>

[snip]

> The point is that content mathml deals with what you might call
> the parse tree, and having the operator in a standard position (the first),
> makes life _vastly_ simpler.  XML just happens to be a handy way
> to encode trees.
>

Just let me add two annotations.

i)
Prefix notations make life _vastly_ simpler for computers but _vastly_
difficult for authors.

ii)
XML is a handy (but far from optimized) way to encode certain subclass of
trees: hierarchical ones. The codification of non-hierarchical trees via
XML is so nightmare that people (including first-class citizens from the
w3c XML world) have developed alternatives to XML which are being used for
solving practical problems: e.g. in the humanities field.

I myself am a find serious problem to codify certain quantum chemical
trees via XML. I am working in an alternative.

> --
> bruce.miller@nist.gov
> http://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/


Juan R.

Center for CANONICAL |SCIENCE)

Received on Friday, 31 March 2006 14:16:22 UTC