Definition of the term "limit"

[Francis Cave]

I think we need to avoid any more re-writing than is absolutely necessary, not out of laziness, but because extensive re-writing increases the risk of inadvertently making a breaking change. The choice of the word "limit" was unfortunate, but as Murata-san has pointed out, that's true of other file formats, and mathematicians have got used to this kind of terminological abuse. Anyway, we're talking about the file format, not the user interface, so all that matters is that implementers know what to do, and they're generally programmers not mathematicians.

Francis



-----Original Message-----
From: Charlie Clark <charlie.clark at clark-consulting.eu> 
Sent: 06 April 2018 14:50
To: SC 34/WG 4 mailing list <e-SC34-WG4 at ecma-international.org>
Subject: Re: Definition of the term "limit"

Am .04.2018, 14:24 Uhr, schrieb MURATA Makoto <eb2m-mrt at asahi-net.or.jp>:

> We abuse the word "limit".  In a LaTex expression $\bigcup_i$, i has 
> nothing to do with convergence.  But in the OOXML terminology, it is a 
> limit.  The definition by Francis exactly captures the OOXML 
> terminology.

It still feels a little awkward to me. I was just thinking of the introductory part of text books which explain the conventions used particularly regarding the positioning.

I assume "bounds" is also, ahem, out of bounds here? I've done some searching but can't find anything significantly better:
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/sipa/math/summation.html

Can we use subscript and superscript of the symbol? I assume it isn't always sigma.

Charlie
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