Re: Too narrowly defined: DIVISION SIGN & COLON

From: Julian Bradfield <jcb+unicode_at_inf.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2012 15:06:12 +0100

On 2012-07-12, Hans Aberg <haberg-1_at_telia.com> wrote:
> On 12 Jul 2012, at 12:33, Julian Bradfield wrote:
>> In practice, no working mathematician is going to use the mathematical
>> alphanumerical symbols to write maths in (La)TeX, because it's
..
>> the Unicode mathematical symbol model does not match how one uses
>> mathematical symbols.
>
> It is used by proof assistants such as Isabelle, and also in logic.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabelle_(proof_assistant)

No it isn't. Isabelle uses (essentially) TeX control sequences
internally, though it writes them as \<oplus> rather than \oplus .
A small number of these are mapped to Unicode code points for display
and input purposes, and that small number does not include any of the
mathematical alphanumerical symbols block.

> If your only objective is to achieve a rendering for humans to read, TeX is fine, but not if one wants to communicate semantic information on the computer level.

On the contrary, computers are very happy with TeX notation. There are
several useful mathematical online learning sites (such as, for
example, Alcumus) which use TeX syntax to interact with the students.

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Received on Thu Jul 12 2012 - 09:07:48 CDT

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