Re: subscripts in v3
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg6772] Re: subscripts in v3
- From: arobson at nv2.uswnvg.com (Andrew Robson)
- Date: Fri, 18 Apr 1997 02:37:39 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Robert (100706.1310 at CompuServe.COM) wrote: : Since Wolfram are represented on this forum I thought it would be worth : canvasing other users on how they feel about the way subscripts work in v3. It : may be that as an Engineer I'm expecting the subscripts to be 'dead' when in : fact others are looking for them to be 'live'. I can see that mathematicians I don't think it is as much dicipline as it is application. I have an engineering applications, but I see the "natural" interpretation of subscripts as array references. : might want them to be live (tensors perhaps?!), however, from a purely : presentational point of view it would be nice to have a symbol, say sigma.sub.x, : in which the x remains purely part of the symbol and is not substituted when x : is evaluated elsewhere. You seem to want a font change in the middle of a single symbol to make it look right. That's a nice feature, but it seems unrelated to the way functional subscripts should work. You should pretty much be able to get the effect that you want by keeping the subscript from being evaluated with Hold, but I'll let the pro's address that. My problems are in the opposite direction -- getting the system to recognize that X(i)=X(j) when i=j without adding a bunch of rules when using subscripts. : I guess the first question is am I being daft by having misinterpreted what : should be the primary intent - and if not do we want v3 .1 or v4 to be more like : a textbook representation of the maths. I am not convinced that Wolfram settled on a "primary intent" when they defined the subscript function. It came out really generic, an pretty much only affects the typography unless you add rules. I wish that either I understood the engine well enough to find the rules I want, or that they had, indeed, decided what subscripts were supposed to mean. Andy