Re: [Maxima-discuss] Encoding of bold, underscored, subscripted and superscripted identifiers by wxmaxima

[Leo B. <l_b...@us...>]

 "Roland Salz" <ma...@ro...> writes:

> Hi,
>
>  
>
> Mathematical literature makes extensive use of bold characters in order to
> give semantic value to identifiers, e.g. mark an identifier to be a vector
> or a tensor.

 Actually, this is an incorrect statement. As a mathematician, I would
 characterize the use of boldface font in order to distinguish "vectors"
 from "scalars" as a crutch used by non-mathematicians (which we
 propagate in teaching non-mathematicians).

> In order to keep formulas readable, every identifier is kept as
> short as possible, even though loaded with all the information necessary.
> Unfortunately, in programming languages 'bold' is not a semantic value but
> merely a style of presentation. The user of maxima, if he thinks
> mathematically in bold - non bold categories, has to somehow translate this
> semantic difference, but he does not find a really satisfying way.
> Identifiers become longer and formulas less readable.

 Unicode has an extended set of characters that let you capture much of
 this. See the attached screenshot for a sample in Maxima (run inside
 Emacs), using the unicodedate package.

 This is orthogonal to your suggestions and the other comments in this
 thread.

 Leo