Saddened by the loss of mathworld. I once attempted to mirror it, but eric's atitude was that it was his "property" (never mind that all the material was discovered by others) and that even people acting in the public interest ought not to propagate his writings, so he outright banned any IPs which crawled more than a particular portion of the site.

I've noticed this thread quite a bit recently: academic people are often as reluctant as corporate people to hand over their work to the public without putting strings on it. Such strings run the gamut from "non-commercial use only" to outright denial of useful work. I've tried arguing the point with a few groups making valuable mathematical software, and have been astonished to hear the argument "why should someone else benefit from my work?"

Why on earth is someone in research, in a publicly funded institution of learning, if they do not expect others to benefit from their work? Are they just there to show off, live the life of a poor researcher, grind theoretical axes with their colleagues? It seems a bit silly given the amount of public information is required to get a good education in the first place.

Oh well. We definitely need to replace mathworld; I fear the UberWikis of the world may not adequately support editing mathematical notation inline, and that some sort of blend of HTML renderings and LaTeX source might be in order. Recent positive impressions of Hevea spring to mind. I somehow doubt that MathML will be able to revive itself. Integrating mathematical semantics and mathematical typesetting seems to me like a fool's errand, as people will always be discovering new branches of mathematics, writing software to explore them, and inventing notations to describe them. I would be perfectly happy to visit a page containing a very good Hevea rendering of some explanatory LaTeX, a link to some PARI or Maxima code implementing the concept, and perhaps a "fetch LaTeX/DVI" button.

wen: to dodge the XML issue entirely and focus on the issue of pseudocode, all I can say is that programming language semantics are a lot more complex than you give them credit for. It is not at all trivial to translate "any" language to "any" other, despite our ability to prove the existence of such translations. A translation will range from a simple statement-for-statement rewrite to an unrecognizable mass of supporting code necessary to preserve meaning. In any event, the idiomatic clarity of code written by a human (which is only moderate at the best of times) is likely to vanish, rendering the main purposes of a high level language (communication and maintainability) moot.