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This program was initially envisioned as a tool for theoretical physicists and mathematicians to allow
them to actually converse with their computers (and this program) using voice recognition.
Complicated theoretical concepts could then be tested for validity very quickly.
Chemists often do preliminary experiments in the lab (sometimes called
'quick and dirty' experiments) that are very useful in determining promptly if a particular line of
reasoning is one that will yield useful results. There is no real
equivalent to this type of experiment in theoretical mathematics, mainly because the work involved
in obtaining solutions that would yield desirable results is very often extremely tedious, time consuming
and error-prone.
This program was, therefore, created to allow theoreticians to be considerably more productive. It will
help with the tedious work of testing ideas and sub-hypotheses by quickly providing analytic
solutions to a variety of problems in order to assist in determining if a line of reasoning is sound and
likely to yield desirable results.
With this vision in mind, a great deal of time and effort was put into the development of the
mathematics editor in order to ensure that is capable of correctly displaying
mathematical expressions at any level of complexity. The editor is capable of
sizing and spacing the user's input automatically so that when voice recognition is introduced
(the present version is not yet capable of this) it will free the user from having to do
this manually.
The program must be able to perform a wide variety of calculations on command and
this requires a very good equation parser and associated auto-calculation abilities. The
parser in AnalyticMath became known as 'MARGE PARSER' or MARGE for short
(this is an acronym for: MAssively Recursive General Equation Parser).
In this version of the program, Marge's basic algorithms seem to perform well and, in future,
should be quite capable of parsing a wide range of mathematical formulae.
The auto-calculation abilities of this version of the program are somewhat limited, mainly
due to time limitations, however, this aspect of the program will be enhanced.
To be continued ...
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