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In-Reply-To:  <199812121915.OAA27357@hilbert.math.albany.edu>
Date:         Sat, 12 Dec 1998 21:54:32 +0100
From: Hans Aberg <haberg@MATEMATIK.SU.SE>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
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Subject:      Re: portable LaTeX
Status: R

At 14:15 -0500 1998/12/12, William F. Hammond wrote:
>For example, we need to understand exactly why mathematicians have
>no trouble parsing
>
>               \sin ax \cos bx  .
>
>Absent that, LaTeX authors will never have a way to know if their
>documents will be safely translated without in some way providing
>parallel MathML code for every math environment.

It is in fact not difficutol to write grammars able to parse such things
(because I have done it -- the calculator on my home page used a similar
grammar).

So what is needed is that the text is written in a context of a grammar
together with a set of translation laws to something that is well defined
(in effect a local computer language).

  Hans Aberg
                  * Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:haberg@member.ams.org>
                  * Home Page: <http://www.matematik.su.se/~haberg/>
                  * AMS member listing: <http://www.ams.org/cml/>