Kris Maglione wrote:
On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 01:28:48PM -0400, Robert C Corsaro wrote:
You want to change the symbolic expression of maths? Tell me how it
works out.
You say that as if there were only one. There are hundreds, in
computer science alone. Nearly every programming language has a
different symbolic expression of math. Think of lisp, APL,
python, haskell. Most of them use infix notation and familiar
operators (+, -), but not all, and all have their own quirks.
Aside from that, since the time of computer text processing,
people have been expressing maths across plain text media
(Usenet, email) in various largely comprehensible forms
(to varying degrees).
Outside of computer science, here are several different (widely
used) expressions of integral-differential calculus. There are
myriad ways to write just about any operation beyond basic
arithmatic. It's largely a matter of personal style, partly a
matter of nationality and specific discipline. But the notations
of maths are hardly homogeneous or fixed.
But you'd have to agree that traditional expressions of math are often
much more convenient when the goal is communication to other humans. I
would even add that they are necessary. Should math text be written in
lisp or APL? That seems a little bit absurd. On the other hand, if
novels were written in plain text it would suite me quite well. I was
just making the distinction between words and math.
