Re: Deprecated $…$ for inline math?

[Alan BRASLAU <alan.braslau@cea.fr>]

On Wed, 17 Feb 2016 13:24:53 -0500
Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu> wrote:

> I am curious to know if there is ANYONE who types in a lot of math
> and regularly uses \m{...} or \math{...}. I still use $....$ and use
> \math{..} or \mathematics{...} only when generating output from lua
> code: context.math("....") etc. is cleaner than context("$%s$", ...)

We should DROP \m{} (in favor of \math{}) as this is really useless. I
suppose that in the beginning (and according to Aditya's blog), this
was some attempt to be as short as $...$, well only two characters
longer. Since no one in his or her right mind would regularly use
\m{...} in favor to $...$, as Aditya himself suggests above, it is
redundant. Indeed, \math{...}, context.math(¨..."), \mathematics{...}
and context.mathematics("...") have their utility. See also below.

On Wed, 17 Feb 2016 20:08:31 +0100
Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl> wrote:

> you're an american citizen who likes $x^2$ but to call if
> beautiful ... €x^2€ nor £x^2£ (in 8 bit encodings / local keyboards
> times) all look bad ... 

Hans, you forgot: ¥x^2¥, ₽x^2₽, ₱x^2₱, ₹x^2₹, ...
Besides, U+0024 comes from ASCII and all programmers know that it is a
perfectly valid and useful character. 

> we need a proper begin/end symbol .. 

Too bad Knuth did not choose ¡x^2! 

> anyway, this won't happen as it's too tricky:
> 
> $[i:tight] x^2$

This is a good case for \math[i:tight]{x^2}
 
> so for controlled situations (we happen to need it) the \m or s
> variant is quite ok (inside xml processing one only needs a few such
> calls in mappings

The \math or \mathematics variant should work in all such cases.

Alan
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