Lurch core classes

Class

Symbol

A Symbol is an atomic Expression. This includes all types of mathematical symbols, from variables like x and y to constants like 1, 2, and pi, as well as symbols for operators like + or the capital sigma for summation.

The primary datum stored in a Symbol is a single text string, which defines the symbol. For more information on this datum, see the constructor.

Note: It is unfortunate that we have a class named Symbol in our ontology while JavaScript also has a class named Symbol. We therefore always import this class using code like the following, to ensure no conflicts in the global scope would prevent us from accessing the original JavaScript Symbol functionality, which we occasionally need.

import { Symbol as LurchSymbol } from './symbol.js'

Constructor

new Symbol(text)

When constructing a symbol, we must provide the text that defines it. This will typically be the Unicode text for the symbol itself, such as "x" or "1", or the Unicode character for the Greek letter pi. But there is no formal requirement that the text stored in the symbol be exactly the text that would be used to represent the symbol in a typical mathematical document. There is not even a requirement that the text have any particular form, except that it be a nonempty string.

Parameters

  • text String

    any nonempty string to be used as the text for this symbol. If this is not a string, it will be converted into one with the String constructor in JavaScript. If that returns an empty string, it will be treated as "undefined" instead.

Source

Classes

Symbol

Methods

insertChild()

Symbols are supposed to be the atomic type of Expression. Thus we override here the default behavior of the insertChild() member of the MathConcept class, making it now do nothing. Since all other child insertion functions (such as pushChild(), etc.) rely internally on insertChild(), this effectively makes it impossible to add children to a Symbol instance.

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text() → {String}

A Symbol never changes its text. To have a new Symbol, just construct a new one with the new text, rather than trying to re-use an old one and change its text. Consequently, this function returns the text given at the time the Symbol was constructed.

Returns

  • String

    the text given at construction time

Source

value() → {*}

The original value() function was implemented in the Expression class, but as a pure virtual method, meaning that it defers its implementation to subclasses. Here, we add support for the following conventions:

  • A Symbol with the "evaluate as" attribute set to "integer" will have a value() equal to the result of parsing the Symbol's text() content as an integer, using the standard JavaScript parseInt() function. This includes ignoring nonsense at the end of the string, returning the inital number only. Nan will be returned if the string does not even begin with an integer.
  • A Symbol with the "evaluate as" attribute set to "real" will have a value() equal to the result of parsing the Symbol's text() content as a real number, using the standard JavaScript parseFloat() function. Note that this supports not only standard decimal notation, but also the text "Infinity" and scientific notation of the form 1.2e3 or 1.2E3. Spaces are permitted and nonsense at the end of the string is ignored. NaN will be returned if the string does not even begin with a float.
  • A Symbol with the "evaluate as" attribute set to "string" will have a value() equal to its text().

Returns

  • *

    The value of the Symbol, as documented above, or undefined if none of the above cases applies

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