Why use MathML?
Here is a partial list of motivations for why the switch to MathML was made in SBML Level 2, in no particular order: • The list of operators available in the text-string formula notation of Level 1 was judged to be limited. People wanted to expand the mathematical vocabulary to include additional functions (both built-in and user-defined), mathematical constants, logical operators, relational operators and a special symbol to represent time. Rather than growing the simple C-like syntax of Level 1 into something more complicated and esoteric in order to support these features, and consequently having to manage two standards in two different formats (XML and text string formulas), we chose to leverage an existing standard for expressing mathematical formulas in Level 2: the content portion of MathML. • There is no standard text-string formula syntax to choose from. The notation in Level 1 was inspired by C, but as many people have pointed out repeatedly, there are differences, and these
