Re: [Texmacs-dev] graph editor

[TeXmacs]

Hi Max,

On Tue, May 18, 2021 at 08:02:12AM +0200, Massimiliano Gubinelli wrote:
> > The question is whether TeXmacs would really be in its role here.
> > This could be considered to be the job of plug-ins.
> 
> It could. But then the question become if we want to provide a unified 
> mechanism to parse mathematical formulas, e.g. from the TeXmacs format to an 
> abstract form which could then used to create expression in some target 
> language  (scheme, mathemagix, Python, etc...) for evaluation.

We already have such a mechanism.
It is used by each plug-in that supports mathematical input.

> Thanks, I will give a look to the parsing support. I looked already in the 
> C++ code but I do not understand how to extract a syntax tree from the 
> parsing execution, it seems that it returns only whether the formula can be 
> parsed.

We would need to add productions to the parser and our grammars.
That is what I planned to do one day, when I would have time.

> > Yet another issue concerns the semantics of symbols/formulas.
> > In different areas, the semantics may differ,
> > so not everybody will necessarily agree with our decisions.
> > 
> 
> I think the common need for plugins is to take a TeXmacs document which 
> represent a mathematical expression and extract some AST e.g. a scheme tree, 
> then a plugin can process this tree to target the final language.

No, this is not what users of plug-ins expect.
They expect to write programs using the syntax of the plug-in.
They do not want TeXmacs to mess up the syntax.
For instance, Mathematica uses [] instead of (),
and Mathematica users want to use the first notation.

Best wishes, --Joris