[SCL] XML syntax options

[John F. Sowa]

Pat and Murray,

MathML has no semantics.  It is a formatter for
mathematical formulas, which must be processed
by some other software:

MA> Just to be clear about my earlier reply, I think
 > we simply can't use MathML unless the semantics are
 > identical. Now... that doesn't mean that an *approach*
 > to syntax similar to MathML isn't possible, i.e.,
 > using an element-heavy approach.

Therefore, it would be possible to adopt the MathML
syntax, and let the SCL processors interpret it
according to the SCL semantics.

But I must admit that I was very disappointed when
I first saw MathML.  I had expected something like
the math formatting facilities developed by Bell Labs,
which were cloned by many other groups, including
LaTeX and the IBM GML processor I was using.

Today, I just type the HTML symbols, such as ∀
∃ ∧ and &or.  Those are easy to type, easy
to remember, and adequate for representing predicate
calculus in HTML.  (It's also trivial to write a
parser in Java or even Javascript to parse that
notation.  No need for no f***king XSLT.)

John