[Axiom-developer] [#8 (Savannah bug #9297) output misses some parenthesis] Why?

[kratt6]

Dear Bill,

did you read my latest comment rearding this bug?

I really don't understand why you think that it could be improved. (OK,
certainly it can be improved, but only with *a lot* of work, including possibly
a rewrite of the way OUTFORM works.

Currently, OUTFORM is coded in a decentral fashion: every object "knows" how to 
display itself, by setting the property '%specialDisp'::

    setProperty(opdsum,  SPECIALDISP,  ddsum@(List F -> O) pretend None)
    setProperty(opdprod, SPECIALDISP, ddprod@(List F -> O) pretend None)

Only some common operations, such as '+' are coded in OUTFORM itself. However, 
the routine displaying '+' does not know anything about the semantics of its 
arguments anymore, since they are already in OUTFORM then. So, you could only 
introduce an ugly *hack*, parsing the first argument of '+\$OUTFORM' and 
looking wether it is a sum or a product or a limit or ... Well, any time a new 
operator is introduced, '+\$OUTFORM' (and of course, also '-\$OUTFORM', 
'*\$OUTFORM', ...)  would have to be readjusted.

Currently the design is very clean, hacking this would be a nightmare, and on 
top of all, what for?

Please provide an example where you dislike the result using the patched 
version! I find

$$
\left(
\sum \sb{\displaystyle {i=1}} \sp{\displaystyle n} {{f 
\left(
{i} 
\right)}+1}
\right)
\leqno(4)
$$

perfectly alright.

Martin
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