Legible Mathematics: Sketches of interactive arithmetic for programming (2014)

Re:Legible Mathematics: Sketches of interactive arithmetic f... by diffeomorphism on Monday February 24, 2020 @11:22AM (#22405405)

So the only take-away I get is that the author does not like to use brackets and really likes writing fractions.

Unfortunately, this does work very badly for long fractions, iterated fractions or, well, anything more complicated than toy examples.

This pops up from time to time with latex and how a/b should give you a fraction instead of having to write \frac{a}{b}. Problem is, this makes one easy case marginally shorter, but something like \frac{a+b}{c+\frac{d}{3}} much harder.

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Re:Legible Mathematics: Sketches of interactive arithmetic f... by andrepd on Monday February 24, 2020 @12:30PM (#22406123)

{a+b}/{c+d/3}

Still looks much better

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Re:Legible Mathematics: Sketches of interactive arithmetic f... by diffeomorphism on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @01:29AM (#22411317)

Hm, reading that it is not immediately obvious whether you mean (c+d)/3 or c + (d)/3. At that point I think it should be straightforward to implement {}/{} as syntactic sugar for \frac{}{}.

Mathematics notation is basically completely determined by consensus and people come up with new notation all the time whenever they need it. In particular, in order to convince someone that your notation is better you have to show previously how hard stuff becomes easy and not how easy stuff becomes even easier.

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Re:Legible Mathematics: Sketches of interactive arithmetic f... by abdullahkhalids on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @02:26AM (#22411465)

TeX already has the primitive of {}\over{} that does what you are saying. It is not typically used.

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/73822/what-is-the-di...

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