[Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs name

[Gubinelli Massimiliano]

Dear all,
 I would like to revive once more the debate on the name for the  
TeXmacs program. There are many reasons for believing that the current  
name does not serve very well the popularity of the program. I've just  
come across to another possibility (among many other already proposed  
and lost somewhere in the internet): Quipu (or kipu, or khipu) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu 
). Apparently this is the ancient way Maya had to keep various kind  
of  informations and seems to mean "knot" so there is some link with  
mathematics and with structured information. The images of Quipus make  
me think to trees (of TeXmacs tags).

Here en excerpt of the wikipedia page (nice and worth reading)

"
Most of the information recorded on the quipus consists of numbers in  
a decimal system;[1] see The encoding system below.
Some of the knots, as well as other features such as color, are  
thought to represent non-numeric information, which has not been  
deciphered. It is generally thought that the system did not include  
phonetic symbols analogous to letters of the alphabet. However Gary  
Urton has suggested that the quipus used a binary system which could  
record phonological or logographicdata.
"


Best,
Massimiliano