[UEB Maths] Some more on formatting and computability

[Phippen, Stephen]

To: UEB Maths Committee
From: Stephen Phippen
Date: 3 June 2005

Reading again what I said in my previous message about format and UEB
code switches, I should perhaps clarify by saying that I am not sure
about this matter myself. Part of my motivation for omitting the
grade 1 mode indicators for the set out equations in the sample on the
BAUK web site was to make it more attractive to UK readers.
I had in mind that such "conveniences" might be necessary to make UEB
acceptable to the UK public, and could be something which we might do
in the UK for the UK audience. But this is speculation, and need not
affect the specification of UEB itself (unless we want it to).

Another thought on computability: What are we actually expecting as
regards automatic translation? Are we expecting translation software
to be able to identify mathematical or computing expressions in a
source file, and treat them appropriately, or would we envisage
such expressions being marked up in some way prior to translation?
UEB is designed so that such expressions would be translated
unambiguously in either case, but can we expect them to be translated
ideally, e.g. as regards our transcription rules for grade 1 indicators
and the spacing of arithmetic operators and relations, without some kind
of markup?

Another case is "sin x". How would translation software know to
treat it as maths, and leave it uncontracted and to ignore the
italics on the x; or, according the suggestion we are thinking
about, use some sort of function indicator? I was wondering if
having function indicators would be problemmatic for
translation, but really it would be no more problemmatic than
without, if we are expecting maths to be translated as we expect.
(Or maybe the answer is that we shouldn't expect anything.)

Another case: a+b+c=ROT. Again, the translator has to know not
to italicise the letters, even where they may look like a literary
word (unless the user ensures that italics are removed beforehand).

With more sophisticated source files, such as TEX, none of this is
an issue because the maths expressions are coded up properly.

Anyway, I think that's more than enough rambling for now!


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