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Re: MakeExpression and color

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg121784] Re: MakeExpression and color
• From: Alexey Popkov <lehin.p at gmail.com>
• Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2011 02:35:52 -0400 (EDT)
• Delivered-to: l-mathgroup@mail-archive0.wolfram.com
• References: <j66ebr$hdm$1@smc.vnet.net>

On 1 Oct, 11:09, John Fultz <jfu... at wolfram.com> wrote:
> I wouldn't call it a compensation.  In fact, it was deliberately designed this
> way all the way from the time boxes were first introduced.
>
> It's not at all bad practice to treat presentation and semantics differently.  
> TagBox is deeply about semantics, and it allows you to link presentation aspects
> to those semantics, which is all well and good...but any attempt to build a
> semantic layer which depends upon parsing all of the available presentation
> information with, at best, heuristics regarding the semantic utility of that
> information is going to quickly end in a very frustrating mess.

But why in this case the only way to get back original definitions for
a symbol goes through parsing of BoxForms backward to "normal"
expressions? For example, if I wish to get back original definitions
for symbol 'f', I am forced to use the following hack and it seems
that there is no other way to get them (all *Values functions does not
respect the difference between immediate and delayed definitions):

MakeExpression[#, StandardForm] & @@ ToBoxes[Definition[f]]

>
> Sincerely,
>
> John Fultz
> jfultz at wolfram.com
> User Interface Group
> Wolfram Research, Inc.

Sincerely,
Alexey