I succesfully use Ghostscript as a postscript previewer on both
Windows and the Mac. It's a bit clunky, but it gets the job done.
Didn't mean to be harsh on the math comments. I agree with you about
an undue worship of the math, and believe me, I'm no REAL
mathematician. But I do take to it nicely, and I find it an extremely
EFFICIENT language for communicating about complicated relational
things.
But it is only a language. So for example, I could say: a hierarchy is
a kind of relation where once you go in one direction, you can never
use the same mechanism to go back the other way; or I could say it's a
poset. Both are valuable, but once I tell you it's a poset, there's
all kinds of other things you know right away: lack of cycles,
multiple roots and leaves, maximum path lengths, etc.
Furthermore, if you want to talk rigorously, then formal language is a
huge advantage. So, I see a continuum from natural language to a kind
of "strict" natural language (where every word is previously defined,
for example) to formal logic to mathematics. What you gain is
consistency and completeness; what you give up is semantic distance
from what you're really talking about.
O----------------------------------------------------------------------------->
| Cliff Joslyn, NRC Research Associate, Cybernetician at Large
| Mail Code 522.3, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771 USA
| joslyn@kong.gsfc.nasa.gov http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/joslyn (301) 286-5773
V All the world is biscuit-shaped. . .