[Axiom-developer] Desired functionality from noweb

[daly]

Cliff,

Another concern is the ability to drag-and-drop a pamphlet
onto axiom and have it "just work".

We need to have an "adaptive" rather than "restrictive" approach,
I think. That is, we need to be able to adapt to xy vs xypic
as long as it doesn't break things. We need to be able to handle
single vs multiple pamphlets. 

All of this can evolve with time, as the requirements arise.

But it will be most helpful if we can rise up out of the dust
of particular syntax and define the algorithms in terms of
functions as I mentioned earlier. Then the algorithms can be
expressed as graph-to-graph transforms and the low level details
can be handled by the pamphlet->graph and graph->pamphlet functions.

Graph-to-graph transformations occur naturally in lisp.
Any graph can be easily expressed in lisp list notation
so any algorithm is just a manipulation of that list.

Better still the lisp list graph can executed as well as manipulated.

Thus, given the latex-to-lisp tranformation

  \section -> (SECTION

and a definition of a SECTION function means that the graph
can have both structural and execution semantics.

Tim