Re: real subscripts and superscripts?

[Karl Berry]

Sure, sub/superscripts are most commonly used in math.  Thus @math, as
in @math{e=mc^2}.  I never expected anything else to be used, certainly
not clunky macros.  This is why @math was created in the first place.

Is your proposal really just working around makeinfo not recognizing ^
and _ in math in the first place?  It seems to me that might be
implementable without too much trouble -- the parsing could maybe be
treated like the accent commands, so that if the next thing is a
non-lbrace single token, the braces aren't necessary.  Seems to me that
could only help, in any case, if it's doable.  Patrice, wdyt?

In HTML etc., the output is always <sup>...</sup> regardless of text or
math mode, since nothing but TeX distinguishes.

Having been drafting the documentation, I can say that it feels quite
clean to say "use @sub/@sup for text, @math{^_...} for math".  It's no
problem to implement @sub/@sup being like ^ and _ in math mode and doing
text in text mode, etc., but, I don't know, usage doesn't seem as clear.

If I may dare to generalize a tiny bit -- in principle, I'd rather that
we recognize TeX math in the first place than invent new Texinfo
commands to do the same thing.

karl