~jonsterling

Cambridge

http://www.jonmsterling.com/

I am an Associate Professor in Logical Foundations and Formal Methods at University of Cambridge in the Department of Computer Science and Technology.

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Re: A Schema, or Protocol, or Standard Format for Trees 5 days ago

From Jon Sterling to ~jonsterling/forester-discuss

On 16 Jun 2025, at 23:34, froup wrote:

> Hello,
>
> This is a proposal for an implementation-independent standard of 
> Forester-like trees.
>
> As shown in the 5.0 release notes with the introduce of URLs and 
> publishing and implanting, Forester is getting more facilities to 
> interact with other forests on the WWW, which illustrates a promising 
> future.
>
> In the meantime, there are other tools inspired more or less by 
> Forester emerging (e.g. https://github.com/kokic/kodama, 

A major milestone: 5.0 merged onto main 13 days ago

From Jon Sterling to ~jonsterling/forester-devel

Dear Forester developers and community,

Today I have merged the long-lived forester-5.0-dev branch onto main. 
Thanks to everyone, especially Kento Okura, who has contributed so much 
time and energy to making Forester 5.0 happen.

Forester 5.0 should be considered “soft-launched” — I have not 
yet sent it to opam, but that will probably happen soon. Please keep in 
mind that there are still bugs and imperfections that we will do our 
best to fix.

 From this point onward, there should be no further commits to 
forester-5.0-dev. I also plan to write something of a post-mortem of the 
5.0 development process on the Forester blog; the project ballooned in a

Re: Math mode issues 13 days ago

From Jon Sterling to ~jonsterling/forester-discuss

> Just had a chance to see if this fix works with the Topos forest, and 
> it
> looks like it's all good!

Glad to hear that!

>
> The one other thing is that it seems like
>
> \title{Using #{\aMacro}}
>
> \import{macros}
>

Re: Forester documentation 16 days ago

From Jon Sterling to ~jonsterling/forester-discuss

Dear Toby,


On 6 Jun 2025, at 10:57, Toby Smithe wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am trying to do something very simple -- recreate Kenta's 
> 'collapsed' macro [1] --- but I have no idea where to look to 
> understand the syntax or semantics of the Forester language.  I do 
> not even know what "\put" does, or how it does it;  let alone its 
> type signature.  Is there any such documentation anywhere?  If so, 
> it is quite hard to find!
>

Re: Unknown binding 23 days ago

From Jon Sterling to ~jonsterling/forester-discuss

On 30 May 2025, at 21:24, Owen Lynch wrote:

> Hi Jon,
>
> The new feature in forester 5.0 which does not allow unknown bindings
> outside of #{...} massively breaks my forests which use
>
> \def\texfig[body]{...}
>
> \texfig{
> % tikz stuff
> }
>
> Could there be a way to mark texfig as entering math mode? Or is 

Re: Feature request: tree aliases a month ago

From Jon Sterling to ~jonsterling/forester-discuss

Dear Nick,

Thanks for this suggestion — I think it’s an interesting idea, and 
it is reasonable to treat it within the expansion or evaluation 
pipeline.

Let me make sure I understand the intended behaviour, which sounds 
slightly subtle:

1) An alias in a named link like [foo](my-alias) just expands to 
[foo](thing-that-my-alias-refers-to).
2) An alias in a wikilink [[my-alias]] will expand to 
[my-alias](my-alias) which expands to 
[my-alias](thing-that-my-alias-refers-to).

Re: Troubleshooting xmnls change a month ago

From Jon Sterling to ~jonsterling/forester-devel

On 28 Apr 2025, at 8:39, Jon Sterling wrote:

> On 28 Apr 2025, at 8:38, Jon Sterling wrote:
>
>> Hi Kris,
>>
>> Sorry this is happening; it would help if you can create a 
>> minimum-working-example in a git repository (or zip file) somewhere, 
>> so that we can figure out what is going on.
>>
>> By the way, I was a bit confused by the subject of the message. Can 
>> you clarify what this has to do with XML namespaces?
>>
>> The behaviour you are reporting *sounds* to me, as Kento says, like 

Re: Troubleshooting xmnls change a month ago

From Jon Sterling to ~jonsterling/forester-devel

On 28 Apr 2025, at 8:38, Jon Sterling wrote:

> Hi Kris,
>
> Sorry this is happening; it would help if you can create a 
> minimum-working-example in a git repository (or zip file) somewhere, 
> so that we can figure out what is going on.
>
> By the way, I was a bit confused by the subject of the message. Can 
> you clarify what this has to do with XML namespaces?
>
> The behaviour you are reporting *sounds* to me, as Kento says, like 
> what would happen if you are trying to use an incompatible/out-of-date 
> theme. But I can only troubleshoot once I have a reproducible version 

Re: Troubleshooting xmnls change a month ago

From Jon Sterling to ~jonsterling/forester-devel

Hi Kris,

Sorry this is happening; it would help if you can create a 
minimum-working-example in a git repository (or zip file) somewhere, so 
that we can figure out what is going on.

By the way, I was a bit confused by the subject of the message. Can you 
clarify what this has to do with XML namespaces?

The behaviour you are reporting *sounds* to me, as Kento says, like what 
would happen if you are trying to use an incompatible/out-of-date theme. 
But I can only troubleshoot once I have a reproducible version of your 
environment.

Re: Resilient Error Handling 2 months ago

From Jon Sterling to ~jonsterling/forester-discuss

Hi Owen,

On Mon, Apr 14, 2025, at 9:35 AM, Owen Lynch wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I've been thinking about forester error handling recently, and I think
> it could be useful to have a "tunable" error strategy which can
> interpolate between gcc's "-Werror" option (the strictest) and a very
> lax error strategy, which *always* succeeds in building a tree, but
> perhaps embeds some error messages into the tree itself.
>
> A -Werror option would be useful for CI building of forests, because
> otherwise it is very easy to accumulate a lot of warnings in a shared
> forest (I won't name any names for who does this in the Topos