Re: [Axiom-developer] mathml sums and products patch

[Arthur Ralfs]

Martin Rubey wrote:
> 3) it seems to me that the domains FORMULA, TEX and MATHML share a *lot* of
>    code.  Woldn't it make sense to factor that out?  Won't the precedence 
> order
>    be the same for all output formats?  I do not know whether anybody still
>    uses SCRIPT, but that's really beside the point... 
>
> 4) Finally, in line with 3), what do you think about moving at least some of
>    the code from i-output.boot to a domain "ASCII"?  I imagine that this might
>    be easier than fixing i-output.boot...  I tried to look into it again,
>    because I really want these terrible display bugs fixed, but I fail to see
>    how it works.  For example, I do not see any precedence order set...
>
> Many thanks again,
>
> Martin
>
>
>   
I spent some time looking closely at the code in i-output.boot.  It
looks awful
to me, probably not something I want to spend my volunteer hours on.  To get
an idea of what's involved I put a write-line statement at the start of
each function
and then issued the command "1", this is what I got back:

(19) -> 1

output
mathprintWithNumber
outputTran
maprin
maprin0
maprinChk
maPrin
charybdis
keyp
charyTop
charyTopWidth
putWidth
keyp
getBindingPowerOf
getOpBindingPower
getBindingPowerOf
getOpBindingPower
putWidth
putWidth
infixArgNeedsParens
getBindingPowerOf
WIDTH
infixArgNeedsParens
getBindingPowerOf
WIDTH
opWidth
keyp
WIDTH
putWidth
APP
appInfix
keyp
getOpBindingPower
getOpBindingPower
WIDTH
appInfixArg
infixArgNeedsParens
getBindingPowerOf
appparu
subspan
superspan
applpar
APP
atom
appChar
appChar
APP
atom
stringer
appChar
WIDTH
apprpar
APP
atom
appChar
WIDTH
appconc
appChar
appInfixArg
infixArgNeedsParens
getBindingPowerOf
APP
atom
stringer
appChar
WIDTH
appconc
superspan
superspan
superspan
superspan
superspan
superspan
superspan
superspan
subspan
subspan
subspan
subspan
subspan
subspan
subspan
subspan
scylla
   (19)  1

That's 84 function calls to print out "1".  The code has almost no
documentation.
I seriously ask the questions: does anybody want to deal with this? is
it worth
spending time on?  Is this type of output anachronistic? What about
fixing up
OutputForm and using that as the default text output?

Arthur