On Mon, 22 Mar 2010, Hans van der Meer wrote:
On 22 mrt 2010, at 16:37, Wolfgang Schuster wrote:
Am 22.03.10 16:32, schrieb Hans van der Meer:
Any thoughts? Either both or the long form only, memory is no longer a reason to create funny names like \infty (can we add \infinity please) I strongly disagree with the idea not defining the forms \lbrack and \lbrace. How do you understand both? Fact is that Knuth defined them in the base of TeX's math. We should at least stay compatible with that. And please do not also kill \infty. Why then not also change \equiv to \equivalent, \approx to \approximate etc, etc? If we start diverging in that way, we loose all ground. To me that sounds as a horror scenario. Who said anything about removing \infty, when you read between the lines I asked if we can add \infinity as long form for \infty.
Good. I have absolute no objection to adding \infinity as an extra to \infty. However, I would plea for a process whereby can be determined which names to add.
If you want to have a process for debating names, then I do not think that the list in char-def is every going to be 10% full. Even right now, we have not been able to add all the existing short names. As a start, I think that we should support all full names in mathml. Someone has already gone through the painful process of having a consensus on the symbol names, so lets just use that. We can worry about the more "obscure" symbols later.
Will it for example be \infinity? Or do we choose \infinite?
In this case, the choice is easy. The symbol has only one name: infinity. Mathml has an entity called infinity. I have not heard it being called infinite.
Otherwise it might lead to a plethora of nearly similar names for all those Knuth'ian short names.
I agree. But I doubt that having a debate about the full name of the symbol is going to help. Different fields use different names for the same symbol. Knuth short names are not perfect to being with. My personal favorites being \cap and \cup for \intersection and \union. Aditya