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Date:         Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:34:28 +0100
From: Marcel Oliver <oliver@NA.MATHEMATIK.UNI-TUEBINGEN.DE>
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Subject:      Re: pattern matching in LaTeX
Status: R

Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> not being a mathematician, i am not sure how to comment on this. i had
> just assumed that publishing "logical" math is a Good Thing

I guess the problem is not whether math is logical, but that
published math contains a lot of omissions or jumps which people
who work in the field know how to fill in.  This is a necessary
mechanism for optimal human-to-human communication.

>  > ones that drive mathematical innovation.  Thus, having data formats
>  > which are optimized for presentation, and others which are optimized for
>  > machine processing of the logical content is,
> i take the point that you need both, that we cannot get rid of
> presentation math, because it performs a valuable function. but for
> the *default*, low-class, mass-market math, surely you'd agree that
> content markup is desirable? surely school textbook math should have
> not have \hspace s in?

Absolutely.  I guess on this level things are, at least in principle,
taken care of by LaTeX, so I assume we are talking about one step
further:
That, at present, I cannot take a piece of LaTeX code, read it
unambiguously into Mathematica and work with it.  (I am using this just
as an example because I am most familiar with the two, but I guess
everybody can replace these by their favorite systems...)

Marcel