[gravypod]

Suppose I find a paper submitted to a conference. The conference lets me download the original latex source of the paper. If I want to take the function they wrote out and take the derivative of it I'd currently have to rewrite the expression. Unfortunately this is very risky with extremely large and complex functions. Ideally it would be cool to just copy a latex expression into your "SymbolicVariable.Parse" method and tell it that it's written in LaTeX.

Copy and paste has a much lower chance to incur errors than rewriting an expression.

[ibluesun]

well I think that would be another layer before sending this to parser

so we can convert the latex expression and send it to the library after that .. I guess it is doable if we are limiting ourself to the math expressions only.

[qubex]

My hard-earned lesson is that representation and manipulation should not be commingled. Traditional mathematical notation is too irregular and idiosyncratic to be safely handled by a symbolic mathematics system. That’s part of the reason why a trained eye can almost always spot the output of a CAS because though correct it almost always expresses stuff in vaguely ’mechanistic’ and/or longwinded ways.

Mentioned elsewhere: I built an (incomplete) implementation of the Risch algorithm for symbolic integration and slapped a MathML-parsing front end on it, and frequently ran into ambiguous cases where the ”abstract syntax” of the purported integral wasn’t what any sane human mathematician would think it could be, yet these errors were self-consistent (limits on double- and higher integrals being circumstances that constantly vexed me).

No, don’t suggest or try doing both of these things in the same place. Keep them separate. It’s just basic software architecture.