Hans Hagen mailto:pragma@wxs.nl 23. Dezember 2015 um 10:17 On 12/23/2015 3:19 AM, Alan BRASLAU wrote:
So it it a TeX programming limitation.
The risk of leading to an exponential number of branches is addressed by Knuth at the beginning of Chapter 17 of the TeXbook (p. 139): "Mathematicians tend to \quote{overuse} \over when they first begin to typeset their own work on a system like \TEX." ...
At one point, I went back to using \over rather than \frac as the later was broken and gave no output. This has since been fixed, but I stayed with \over as I find primary operators to be much more elegant syntax than multiple argument macros. It is too bad that luatex does not employ a better programming solution, as the use of \frac{}{} leads to ugly mathematical source code.
Well, it is not impossible in mkiv do make something 1\alansover2 that adjusts itself to some settings (i could probably do it right now) but who will use it (apart from you) and who would document it then .. Would this method allow fractions in the second form below with ÷ instead of \over?
\starttext \startformula 1 = \frac{2}{3} + { 1 ÷ 3 } \stopformula \stoptext Wolfgang