I somehow feel it is a pitty that Knuth went on to design his own method for describing mathematical expressions, as his seems to less semantic and more based o

I somehow feel it is a pitty that Knuth went on to design his own method for describing mathematical expressions, as his seems to less semantic and more based on representation. Note how in his notation the two '_' have a total different semantic meaning, while in eqn different syntax is used. His method is a more consize, but even not that much, but her method is much closer to how the resulting expression is read. I did have a look at the paper mentioned and note that terms like 'sub' and 'sup' are also related to position. An even more semantic approach probably would use 'x power 2' instead of 'x sup 2'.