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

[Martin Rubey]

Arthur Ralfs <address@hidden> writes:

> I spent some time looking closely at the code in i-output.boot.  It
> looks awful
> to me, 

it looks awful.  Not only to you :-)

> 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:

[...]

> I seriously ask the questions: does anybody want to deal with this? is it
> worth spending time on?  

I don't think so.  Rather, I believe we should have a few commands in boot
(something like print a string, get output width, etc.), the rest should move
to spad.

> Is this type of output anachronistic? What about fixing up OutputForm and
> using that as the default text output?

No, OutputForm is (or rather, will be) the domain abstracting output.  I guess,
if we get OutputForm to be good enough for content mathml, TeX and ASCII, it
will be really good enough for most what is to come.

What we need is a domain ASCII, that converts OutputForm to ASCII art.  I don't
think that this can be too difficult:  you could start with the mathml domain
and gradually replace mathml markup by ascii art.

Martin