mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Madhusudan Singh <address@hidden>]

Hello,

I think that TeXmacs is almost the perfect name for the program. It has TeX support, and is almost as versatile as Emacs. I would have perhaps preferred something like SciTeXWriter (or SciTeXmaster, given that it is more than just a writer), but TeXmacs does nicely.

Your other proposed name is obscure sounding, and if anything, does not convey anything about the functionality of the program to the potential userbase. Name changes are usually fraught with confusion, and unless there is a really massive upside, best not done.

With regards.

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:09 AM, Gubinelli Massimiliano <address@hidden> wrote:

(almost crossposting from address@hidden)

Dear all,
 I would like to revive once more the debate on the name for the  
TeXmacs program. There are many reasons for believing that the current  
name does not serve very well the popularity of the program. I've just  
come across to another possibility (among many other already proposed  
and lost somewhere in the internet): 

*  Quipu (or kipu, or khipu) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu). 

Apparently this is the ancient way Incas had to keep various kind  
of  informations and seems to mean "knot" so there is some link with  
mathematics and with structured information. The images of Quipus make  
me think to trees (of TeXmacs tags).

Here en excerpt of the wikipedia page (nice and worth reading)

"
Most of the information recorded on the quipus consists of numbers in  
a decimal system;[1] see The encoding system below.
Some of the knots, as well as other features such as color, are  
thought to represent non-numeric information, which has not been  
deciphered. It is generally thought that the system did not include  
phonetic symbols analogous to letters of the alphabet. However Gary  
Urton has suggested that the quipus used a binary system which could  
record phonological or logographicdata.
"

Another possible name :

* Tiamat (Tiamat is another mathematical authoring tool)

which has the benefit to allow to conserve the extension .tm

Best,

Massimiliano

ps: thanks to Martin for correcting my previous post on texmacs-dev.