I am envisioning a future system in which you can move between computer-friendly code representations of mathematical objects and corresponding human-friendly descriptions. This would be an application of the literate programming approach to mathematics.
Eventually, creating a way to switch "views" of an object may become a useful task for PM. Such a tool would also make it possible to easily switch between different natural language representations of an object.
We might expect to see the HDM arise as a substratum of PM by following this path. Eventually HDM would contain PM, perhaps that means that in the future they will really be the same project.
Literate programming would also be relevant to PlanetComputing, if examples of functioning code are added to that system. Again, immediate translation between different languages would be an interesting feature, since it would allow a LISP programmer to learn the appropriate Perl idioms for doing some known task without much trouble, for example.
--jcorneli Mon Jan 31 23:42:01 2005
Actually, HDM and PM can't be the same project in the end unless we change the licensing of PM, because the HDM will have a large public domain component. Of course, it wouldn't kill us to make a new piece of PM with different licensing terms. Indeed, if PM or PC is going to have a large code component, we would want to adjust the licensing terms so that the GPL terms apply to the the code. --jcorneli Mon Jan 31 23:47:21 2005
It is misleading to talk about HDM containing PM; actually, it would just contain a semantic equivalent. --jcorneli Fri Feb 4 01:44:21 2005