[Tex/LaTex] (Semantically) correct string concatenation symbol

symbols

I'm wondering about what's the "correct" symbol to use when typesetting standard string concatenation (I've seen How do I typeset the concatenation of strings properly? btw, but it deals with a non-standard variant of concatenation, which I'm not interested in).

Should one use || directly or \parallel? Or maybe something else completely?
I'm not able to make up my mind about the first two. || seems to be what I'm after usually, but sometimes it feels like it leaves too little space between the concatenated words. Conversely, \parallel also seems to work sometimes, but often leaves too much space between words.

So, which one to chose if I were to do this "correctly"?

Best Answer

Define \conc at the start to be whatever symbol you want to use. Then you can redefine it if you need to, because you're being semantically appropriate. That has the additional advantage that you can globally set the symbol type (ie if you want it to behave as an operator or relation) or manually change the kerning.

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Since a vector in R^2 is written (1, 2), it would make sense to concatenate two vectors a and b as (a,b).

[Tex/LaTex] Correct symbol for the Laplace operator ($\Delta$)

If you use the D'Alembert operator as well, you might find pretty using the symbol \bigtriangleup for your Laplace operator, in order to get a similar look as the \Box symbol that is being used for D'Alambertian. In the following, a tricky construction with \mathop and \mathbin is used to get the proper spacing:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{amsmath,amssymb}

\newcommand*\Laplace{\mathop{}\!\mathbin\bigtriangleup}
\newcommand*\DAlambert{\mathop{}\!\mathbin\Box}

\pagestyle{empty}

\begin{document}

\begin{gather*}
  \phi(1+\Laplace A) \neq \phi(1+\Delta A)
\\ 
  \phi(1+\DAlambert A) \neq \phi(1+\Laplace A)
\\ 
  f\Laplace g
\end{gather*}

\end{document}

Example

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] String/vector concatenation symbol

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