Speculative Components and Symbols

Design: components and symbols

Speculative design. Open, not settled — thinking and proposals, not shipped behavior. See Roadmap for what's in flight.

Split from Components and Symbols: §7 Open questions, plus the "Other renderers" idea from §3 (an experiment, not a plan).

From §3: other renderers

• Other renderers. A tree of Cell, Plot, Manipulate, Histogram is a small interface description, and nothing about it is the DOM's. The same tree could render in a terminal (the REPL already has notatio-terminal's host side) or natively on mobile, with a different set of components behind the same symbols. An experiment, not a plan — but it only works if the symbols are the interface, which is the alignment argument again.

Open questions

• Argument conventions. Wolfram's {x, 0, 10} iterator is our (x, 0, 10) tuple (InputForm already prints Integrate bounds that way); options (PlotRange -> …) have no notatio spelling yet — Epsil's a -> b is a KeyValuePair, not Wolfram's Rule, and the elements take attributes. Whether a Plot head takes options as trailing pairs or as a settings record is the same question the worksheet's \mathsf{…} settings namespace answered one way.
• Which symbol for the symbol-less components. Cell is Wolfram's (a notebook cell), so notatio-cell is aligned after all and the wrapper is rightly <Cell>. notatio-worksheet has no Wolfram name; Notebook is taken by our notebook. notatio-figure's eleven glyphs are the hardest case — a Figure(kind, …) family head is the §4 answer, if the glyphs are worth a symbol at all.
• Hints for the family heads. Chart(data, "pie") names the member; anything richer — an axis mapping, a bin count — has no notatio spelling beyond the attributes, which is the argument-conventions question again.
• Other renderers. The terminal (notatio-terminal's host side) could draw a Plot head through @enumeratio/raster the way it already draws glyphs — the same renderingOf map with a different set of components behind the tags.