Re: an extension of the mizar language for dealing with article metadata

Josef Urban <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.mathematics.mizar
Message-ID <[email protected]>

On Sun, 30 Nov 2008, trybulec wrote:

> Josef Urban wrote:
>
>> 
>> So why is the keyword "begin" allowed multiple times to introduce sections, 
>> and why do all articles start with the standard header containing author 
>> and title, why are comments allowed at all? If there is no need to process 
>> and present these article
>
> That is my complaint, the repetition of 'begin' has nothing to do with Mizar, 
> and should not be allowed. I would prefer
> something like:
>
> ::$ SECTION
>
> maybe with a name, as a cross reference to the place where description of the 
> section is kept:
>  the title, maybe a summary
>
> BTW. In Mizar HPF (around 1993) only one kind of comments was allowed: 
> written by a pen on the printout.
> It did not work.

No wonder. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

Comments in programming languages serve as a general storage for anything 
that the language does not capture yet. If there is a frequent need for 
expressing certain annotations, such annotations should be eventually made 
more formal and taken care of by extending the language's syntax. I think 
Isabelle/Isar has done this, and the result is that it is much easier to 
write publishable papers about Isar formalizations (or more precisely: the 
formalizations can already contain all the TeX documentation/paper).

Josef
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