[Axiom-developer] Re: [fricas-devel] Re: [Axiom-mail] InputForm

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

Bill Page <address@hidden> writes:

| On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 4:43 PM, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
| > ...
| > I would reserve the use of InputForm for syntatic canonical
| > forms of mathematical objects.
| >
| 
| Currently InputForm values can arise both from parsing of input
| strings and 

That is the job of Syntax domain in OpenAxiom.

| from coercion of values from other domains. Only the
| latter are in some sense "cononical". But even these are only
| cononical to the degree that the domain from which they are derived
| has such properties.

Obviously.  For OpenAxiom, a domain that can see its values used as
constructor arguments should satisfy both SetCategory and 
CoercibleTo InputForm.  If a domain cannot satisfy those too
constraints, there is little point in trying to use its value as
constructor arguments.

| So it is not clear to me how one can hope to reserve InputForm for
| only this use. 

It is a design choice.  However, I fully appreciate there are many
choices to make and people are likely to make different choices.

-- Gaby