My research has come up with a much better package than algorithmic,
the styles for "Introduction to Algorithms" is available at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~thc/clrscode/. I've perused wikipedia a
bit, and I really don't like how algorithms look there. The appeal of
the use of LaTeX, is mostly for the use of boolean algebra and set
theory symbols.... although sometimes other symbols like floor or
ceiling would be highly useful.
I really like the pseudo-code style used in Introduction to
Algorithms. I think that using an actual programming language to show
an algorithm will hide the elegance of the algorithm itself, and
introduce messy details. See for yourself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford-Fulkerson_algorithm#Python_implementation
vs.
http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~sanders/courses/algdat03/maxflow.pdf
(if you skim through that, you can see some very nice algorithm
descriptions using mathematical symbols).
It would be nice if there was an <algo> tag which supported a subset
of LaTeX specifically for the implementation of algorithms, suitably
wikified. If you look at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~thc/clrscode/clrscode.pdf it could be
used as the basis for a simple algorithm markup. The other thing I
like about using a pseudo-code style very similar to that of the one
in Introduction of Algorithms, is the fact that most CS students have
probably used that book... and are already comfortable with the
syntax.
Some part of me thinks it is silly to introduce an <algo> tag though,
because you get something very specific to solving one problem that
isn't so useful to others. It would probably be best just to suitably
adjust the LaTeX output so that you can directly implement your
algorithms as shown in the above PDF.
AJ
On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 6:45 PM, Conrad Irwin <conrad.irwin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 29 June 2010 19:58, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Ilmari Karonen
<nospam(a)vyznev.net> wrote:
I'm not familiar enough with the texvc code
to know what it would take
to add support for the algorithmic package (and I'm not sure if anyone
really is; that code is notoriously low on active maintainers).
It should be trivial. Just add a usepackage in the right place and
whitelist the commands. Of course, this will cause a fatal error on
any system where the algorithmic package isn't installed, but it
shouldn't be too hard to set it up so that this is only triggered in
equations that actually try to use the package -- there's already
something like that for AMS.
I'd been hoping to do similar things in the next few days, as part of
a clean up of the trivial bugs that have accumulated for texvc -
adding new features is trivial, it's just if we want to change old
ones that
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16719 starts
to get in the way.
Agreeing with Ilmari Karonen, I'd hugely prefer not to use LaTeX for
algorithms, there are a large number of programming languages with
defined (or at least reasonably widely agreed upon) semantics, all of
which can be beautified by GeSHi, using a custom pseudo-code and then
converting the text to an image seems like a huge step backwards in
terms of making something easily readable by the largest number of
people. Many modern (i.e. post 1990) languages are comparable to
pseudo-code in conciseness, and it's usually possible to write
algorithms that don't make use of less standard features of such
languages.
Conrad
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