Re: [Texmacs-dev] [TeXmacs] A question and proposals about references

[Massimiliano Gubinelli]

I agree, but I think this is an early design problem given by following too 
tightly the LaTeX model. It is not obvious how to change things and not break 
old documents. 

Anyway I think a good solution to this problem would really improve a lot the 
design of the document format.

best
Max



> On 10 Apr 2023, at 17:32, Frank <sci.frank@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> Let me first quote a paragraph in TeXmacs documents:
> 
>> You first have to create a label at the position to which you want to refer. 
>> For equations, the label should be created inside the equation, and 
>> similarly for theorems and most other tags. The labels for sections, 
>> subsections, etc. should rather be positioned just after the section titles; 
>> this prevents TeXmacs from duplicating the labels in the table of contents.
> 
> I did not find any rationale for this. Now I look at some codes, and if I 
> understand correctly, it is doing the following:
> 
> (set-binding name) — setting a binding with name "name" (this seems to be 
> undocumented).
> (label lab) — setting a label lab, which has the *last* binding.
> (reference lab) — a reference to the label lab, displayed as the name of the 
> associated binding.
> 
> I find this counter-intuitive — where we set a label, it is a priori unclear 
> where is the last binding, plus depending on a very low-level undocumented 
> machinery called binding. For example, we can look at the following 
> artificial TeXmacs Scheme code:
> 
> (document (theorem (document "Consider the following conjecture" (indent 
> (document (conjecture (document (concat "Some conjucture for " (math 
> "n<in><bbb-N>") "."))))) (concat "It holds for " (math "n<leq>100") "." 
> (label "thm:1")))) (reference "thm:1"))
> 
> The label "thm:1" is associated to the binding produced by the "Conjecture 
> 2", with name "2" instead of "1". This does not seem to be intuitive. This 
> could be resolved by moving the label "thm:1" before "Conjecture 2", but this 
> does not seem to be good for me.
> 
> I would propose the following:
> 
> 1. "Bindings" should be local to the environment. In particular, in the 
> preceding code, "thm:1" should refer to 1 — the binding in "Conjecture 2" 
> should be local in this environment, and outside this environment, the value 
> should be resumed to be the one of "Theorem 1" environment.
> 2. We should have abstractions "labeled-theorem", "labeled-conjecture", which 
> allows others to avoid low-level abstractions such as bindings.
> 
> Best wishes,
> Frank
> 
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