Re: Negative numbers in MathML Intent

FYI, It is interesting that in both APL and Scheme  negative numbers are
lexemes.   I.e., in Scheme -2  is a lexeme, (- 2) is a function call.
 Both are ASCII minus signs.   In APL, the "high minus" is used for
negative numbers, e.g.  ¯2.   APL predates Unicode, but these days one uses
U+00AF.

On Thu, May 26, 2022 at 2:36 PM Deyan Ginev <deyan.ginev@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>