SUBSTANCE and STYLE: Domain-Specific Languages for Mathematical Diagrams

Wode Ni, Katherine Ye, Joshua Sunshine, Jonathan Aldrich, and Keenan Crane

Workshop Paper, SPLASH '17 Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation (DSLDI) Workshop, October, 2017

Abstract

Creating mathematical diagrams is essential for both developing one’s intuition and conveying it to others. However, formalizing diagrams in most general-purpose tools requires painstaking low-level manipulation of shapes and positions. We report on early work on PENROSE, a system we are building to automatically visualize mathematics from notation. PENROSE comprises two languages: Substance, a domain-specific language that mimics the declarativeness of mathematical notation, and Style, a styling language that concisely specifies the visual semantics of the notation. Our system can automatically visualize set theory expressions with user-defined styles, and it can visualize abstract definitions of functions by producing concrete examples. We plan to extend the system to more domains of mathematics.

BibTeX

@workshop{Ni-2017-121370,
author = {Wode Ni and Katherine Ye and Joshua Sunshine and Jonathan Aldrich and Keenan Crane},
title = {SUBSTANCE and STYLE: Domain-Specific Languages for Mathematical Diagrams},
booktitle = {Proceedings of SPLASH '17 Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation (DSLDI) Workshop},
year = {2017},
month = {October},
}

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