Re: [Gmath-devel] Mathematical Symbols

[Hassan A. <au...@cr...>]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

On 6/7/00, 8:51:21 AM, Klaus Niederkrueger <kl...@xo...> wrote 
regarding [Gmath-devel] Mathematical Symbols:


> Dear Hassan,

> I think your Project sounds very nice and indeed it is a good idea to
> provide a generic user-interface for mathematical programs. I have 
been
> using for sometime Maple and though I confess that I use most often
> text-mode, I really like the cut and paste functions of this program. 
I
> don't know how mathematica looks like, but I guess similar.

 Well thanks for your comments. Now, if you could be more precise 
about cut and paste. I don't really understand or your question is 
trivial. Do you really mean cut and paste, or is it drag and drop?

> Are you planning to implement such cut and paste functions for your
> project? Are you able to display fractions, greek letters,
> integral-signs and so on? (For greek letters Pango should do it, I 
guess
> and I think it will be soon used as default for Gtk anyway, but
> fractions and subindexes and things is probably difficult.)

 This is a tough one. Ok, for now gmath's session is really a terminal 
session with some hopefully nice user layer.

 Think of it a Mathematica 1.0 but looking better. The next step for 
me is to leave this interface for terminal sessions, and write a new one. 

 However for now, gnome/gtk text widgets are ugly and useless. I 
thought about the canvas but that would be too much work, and I don't 
want to do it.

 This simply means that I have to wait for gnome/gtk folks to finish 
writing pango. Pango is a niftier text widget with support for all 
kinds of input and for unicode.

 Again this means that when all is done, we would be able to display 
just about anything in those, including math symbols and such. 
Otherwise, you need to write those symbols yourself or have the kind 
of resources Wolfram has to create Mathematica.

 So for now, think of GmatH, as a nice numerical simulation 
environment, where you can compute, visualize, save sessions, then use 
them as starting point for coding more complex stuff, soon code, debug 
....

 We will take care of presentation later.

> I'm not sure if I really want to participate, but I will have at least 
a
> look at your program.


 Thanks.

> By the way, when I was doing my master thesis I developed a small
> algebra-program and the thing I really found annoying was, that I had 
to
> program the parser that transforms all those term like [[a,b]+5c,d] 
into
> a tree structure myself. Could you tell me if you know a standard
> library for this, please.


 I have not yet looked at those things. Ayal Pinkus the creator and 
maintainer of Yacas should be able to help you more with that.
 He is on the list yell Ayal.

> Thank you for your effort and I will watch your program with interest.

 Thanks and have fun

> Greetings
>       Klaus Niederkrueger

> A suggestion: The reason why I don't use Xmaple anymore was that they
> switched from the nice Unix-interface to a windows interface. I 
explain:
> In older versions everytime you made a plot, a new window was opened 
for
> it. In their newer versions the plot is embedded into the worksheet 
and
> you cannot move a subwindow out of the mainwindow. Though this at 
first
> looks really very compact and elegant, I think is really 
antiproductive.
> I think if you write a text it may be normal to have just one window
> open, but for mathematics this is not the case.

 I agree, but have no fear since no embedding will happen for now. As 
far as I am concerned. I'd like to have a full-fledged data 
visualization thing, a coding/session/debugging thing, a presentation 
thing. But that's far still.

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