David Carlisle scripsit:
> > It's a lot easier to use
> > eqn than TeX to express mathematical text,
>
> Not sure about that really (certainly TeX is vastly more popular with
> mathematicians than eqn)
The design point for eqn was secretaries who had to type mathematics
without knowing any mathematics. Eqn does have usability bugs: if you
type (foo sub 2) it makes the ) part of the subscript, and you have to
use braces or say (foo sub 2 ). But K C observed that although mathematicians
liked the system (but did complain about the output), it was a complete
success with secretaries.
Nowadays, of course, we are all our own secretaries (and telephone operators,
too, but that's a different tale).
> However your main point is still valid, and both eqn
> and TeX are a lot easier to author by hand than MathML (although pretty
> much impossible to process by anything other than the specified
> application).
TeX is Turing-complete. I could imagine a version of eqn that looked for
$$$ ... $$$ brackets and generated TeX, though.
--
He made the Legislature meet at one-horse John Cowan
tank-towns out in the alfalfa belt, so that
hardly nobody could get there and most of http://www.reutershealth.com
the leaders would stay home and let him go http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
to work and do things as he pleased. --Mencken, _Declaration of Independence_
