Negative numbers in MathML Intent

Hi everyone,

A brief entertaining follow-up to our encounter with negative numbers
as intent (literal) values today.

In 1758, the British mathematician Francis Maseres professed that
negative numbers:

"... darken the very whole doctrines of the equations and make dark of
the things which are in their nature excessively obvious and simple".

We've moved some distance since then, but negative numbers will indeed
make intent values a little harder to parse into data structures.
Still, I think we had a healthy consensus that the proposal for
including them is workable and beneficial.

As a last remark, notice that the current intent grammar [1] still
prohibits complex numbers from appearing as literals. That manages to
date our progress nicely as having reached the early 18th century.

This is completely in jest of course! Today's meeting was quite fruitful.

Kind regards,
Deyan

[1] https://w3c.github.io/mathml/#mixing_intent_grammar

Received on Thursday, 26 May 2022 18:35:54 UTC