Unambiguously describing molecules... and more

Hi,

In some engelangs one goal might be to be able to describe different
chemical molecules. Of course systems created to imitate the conventional
chemical formulas (water = H2O, carbon dioxide = CO2, with the 2's as
subscripts) can easily be made, but for the engelanger a common goal is to
reduce ambiguity. And ambiguity can be found when trying to describe...

Isomers. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomer) So... basically what I'm
asking (or thinking about) is how to describe molecules, not only by the
atoms they contain, but also their structure (the bonds).  Can you come up
with anything better that SMILES (see
http://www.daylight.com/dayhtml/doc/theory/theory.smiles.html)?

In general, have any of you all included describing graphs (this kind of
graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_%28mathematics%29) in your
languages. Which traversal method is best?

This problem does not reduce to just reading row by row off of a matrix (I
hope you know what I mean) where the row and column headers are the
different vertices because if the graph is not connected and there are
cycles in either of the parts, it is unknown if one of the parts is inside
of another or not.

-Leon

Reply