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Most mathematicians are doing work that is, frankly, formally unsound. There's a huge culture of hidden assumptions in most mathematical fields. Not to mention
by User23 4y ago
Most mathematicians are doing work that is, frankly, formally unsound. There's a huge culture of hidden assumptions in most mathematical fields.
Not to mention that the syntax is literally unparseable. For example what does this mean?
sin(x) + cos(x)
Most mathematicians would say it's the sum of the sine of x and the cosine of x. But it parses fine as the sum of the product of s, i, and n(x), and the product of c, o, and s(x). Obviously that kind of ambiguity is unacceptable in a formal procedure syntax like that used by programming languages. That's just a simple example, traditional math is full of this kind of thing.
- guerrilla 4y ago> But it parses fine as the sum of the product of s, i, and n(x), and the product of c, o, and s(x). No it doesn't because math lexes greedily (and is also context sensitive anyway.) 'sin' is a symbol just like 'x'. There's no ambiguity in your example.
- practal 4y agoIt's a weird example, but you definitely got a point. Of course, an ambiguity like in your example never causes a problem, because this text is parsed by humans, not by machines!