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Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

Shameless plug: I made a competing library to asciimath called mathup

Nice! I was confused about your "Why AsciiMath" section, which doesn't say anything about AsciiMath. It's also unclear to me what the difference is between Mathup and AsciiMath - you write that Mathup is inspired by it but it's not clear to me what made you invent something else - i assume AsciiMath has flaws that you're addressing? Would be worth writing down I suppose.

I see this is confusing, this segment I wrote a long time ago and I felt I had to justify why I chose to write an asciimath dialog instead of just picking LaTeX (and doing what Temml did years later).

I suppose I should change the title to say “Why an AsciiMath Dialog” and then add another subsection “Why not AsciiMath”.

The short answer is that AsciiMath is an excellent language IMO but a rather lacking implementation. Shortcomings of this particular dialog are raised in a different thread here, but for me personally the biggest issue was in the output format. AsciiMath is pretty tightly integrated into each implementation (like MathJax) instead of just outputting standard MathML. I also altered the dialog a bit, e.g. the matrix notation is a bit different in mathup, and I also add the possibility to use whitespace to group sub-expressions (similar to typist).

I don’t understand what you mean with “Dialog”. This is a language right? And not a UI?

Sorry, meant to say dialect. I have confused these two words before, haha.

Yes, why did you make this if asciimath exists? Not to say that you shouldn't have made it, but what does it do that asciimath doesn't in your view? Just curious to understand

The main difference is in the output. AsciiMath is tightly integrated into each tool (e.g. mathjax), while mathup simply outputs standard MathML.

There are also small differences in the language, main one being the use of whitespace to group expressions in mathup (similar [but not identical] to typist).

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