4 ms·
HN (and myself honestly) might be a bit biased in favour of Lisps, but if one wanted an unambiguous notation for mathematics, Polish notation / s-expr style wri
by ThatGeoGuy 4y ago
HN (and myself honestly) might be a bit biased in favour of Lisps, but if one wanted an unambiguous notation for mathematics, Polish notation / s-expr style writing would be the way to go.
As for screen-readers -> parsing s-expressions and converting them into a more meaningful reading of the equation is within our power as well.
That's not to say that everything should be a lisp, but in terms of unambiguously applying mathematical formulae, I think (* f (+ x 1)) is very distinct from (f (+ x 1)).
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ mileage may vary I suppose. As someone who uses LaTeX a lot myself, I'm not sure I'd be fully happy writing Scheme / Lisp instead either. But I'm not sure the article really gives us less ambiguity purely thanks to an extra whitespace.
- sritchie 4y agoIf you want to try this out, give the sicmutils Computer Algebra System a go (I’m the maintainer). Repo lives here: https://github.com/sicmutils/sicmutils https://github.com/sicmutils/sicmutils The library works in the browser as well, so interactive TeX rendering from Clojure symbolic expressions and functions is available at the quickstart page here: https://nextjournal.com/try/samritchie/sicmutils https://nextjournal.com/try/samritchie/sicmutils
- auggierose 4y agoAgreed. I don't think Space Math represents a viable solution, I was just looking at it to survey the design space of math notation on a computer.