On Monday, April 27, 2020 at 1:01:56 AM UTC-4, Mario Carneiro wrote:
> >> I know, and this is a bigger issue for set.mm than in the mm0 databases
> >> because these are smaller and more purpose driven. One reason I went with
> >> _c notations for characters is because it is easier to read
> >> _h : _e : _l : _l : _o : __ : _w : _o : _r : _l : _d
> >> than
> >> 'h' : 'e' : 'l' : 'l' : 'o' : 'sp' : 'w' : 'o' : 'r' : 'l' : 'd'

On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 7:35 AM Norman Megill <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Maybe I missed something in this thread, but what is the purpose of
> > formalizing ASCII?  Is this something that eventually might be added to
> > set.mm?.

On Mon, 27 Apr 2020 18:10:05 -0700, Mario Carneiro <[email protected]> wrote:
> While I have no
> immediate plans to move this to set.mm, this is a possibility, and it also
> shows an example of a mathematically reasonable use of ASCII formalization,
> which may come up in set.mm in another form (e.g. metamath in metamath).

All by itself that's a potentially interesting use (metamath in metamath).

Norman Megill:
> > Our informal convention has been to prefix non-italic letters with
> > underscore, like _i, so _<letter> will clash with a few that already
> > exist.  How about a single quote prefix, 'a 'b 'c ... like in Lisp 'foo to
> > abbreviate (quote foo)?
> > That would not clash with anything in set.mm
> > except ''' in AV's mathbox (for alternate function value) which could be
> > changed.

I like that convention. Especially since I know Lisp :-).

Mario:
> This also works for me. I don't think it is essential to commit to a
> notation right now since I'm not actually adding these characters to set.mm,
> but I wanted to make sure that others keep this use in mind.

It may not be *essential*, but I think it would be wise to "reserve" these
symbols for future use. Usually we add 1-2 symbols at a time, but if we ever
add a representation of ASCII, we'd want to add a large set with exactly the
same rule (whatever that is). If we reserve them now & don't use them, no big 
deal.
If we don't reserve them, we might we have to do a lot of renaming and other 
nonsense
to have a large set of symbols with a consistent convention.

I'll try to make a pull request to define 'LETTER for a set, so that people 
will be
automatically warned if they try to define an operation for some other purpose.
That will "reserve" the pattern for potential use later.

--- David A. Wheeler

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