Introduction to the notation

The present hypermanual is organized in two layers, where the upper layer is expressed in HTML and the lower layer are LaTeX documents which are made available in postscript form. The full documents have of course access to the full reportoire of mathematical formulae, but due to the present difficulties with mathematical formulae in HTML, we will express them in typewrite font. In line with that, they will use Lisp-like notation, where function symbols and other operators are written inside the parentheses and together with their arguments.

An additional advantage of that arrangement is that the notation on the HTML level can be directly viewed as input to Lisp and other similar programming languages.

This does not exclude that there will be some examples of formulas even in the HTML pages - they have been rendered via GIF code. However this is so inconvenient that we do not do it all the time.

The following is a simple example of a chronicle in HTML level format:

(schedule)
  (do (ivl s0 s1) load)
  (do (ivl s1 s2) wait)
  (do (ivl s2 s3) fire)
(observations)
  (see s0 (loaded F)(alive T))
(question)
  (see s3 (alive T))