There have got to be some simple free parsers out there that we could base this on. See also On the Syntax and Semantics of Mathematical Expressions for design principles.
Also, it is wothwhile to consider the inverse problem — converting sexps into TeX. As the h-code project progresses, it might be a good idea to consider to work on routines that will rewrite sexp notation for math in the usual notation. These two projects should go hand-in-hand — on the one hand, it is impossible translate from a language which is still not completely defined, so obviously we need to work on developing h-code. On the other hand, it might not be so good an idea to wait until h-code is completely developed and stable to begin writing the routine for translating it to conventional mathematical notation, because then one has to do all the work at once. A better way might be to start by writing the routines to translate the simpler part of h-code which is already developed and not likely to change drastically in the future, and then add to these as the h-code project progresses.
Well, we now have a file that does simple conversions in both directions, here. This is very cheery news. However, the current version has very limited functionality: there are many other kinds of math expressions out there that the file can't handle. So the task has begin, but needs more work.
--jcorneli Mon Feb 21 03:21:16 2005 UTC
I am a little confused by this file – it doesn't seem to exist in the CVS.
--shargestam Sat Jun 18 2005
ah - this is an old file. The old sttts.el has been broken apart into stt.el and tts.el (and tts.el has subsequently been broken into several smaller pieces itself. As of this writing, the relevant files are
stt.el tts-assist.el tts-continuation.el tts-greedy.el tts-symbols.el tts-testing.el tts-utils.el tts.el
All in the parsing subdirectory. --jcorneli Sun Jun 19 00:58:01 2005 UTC