Re: [ANN] new corporate sponsor

[Hans Hagen <pragma@...>]

On 11-5-2010 10:17, Leo Razoumov wrote:
> On 2010-05-11, Hans Hagen<pragma@wxs.nl>  wrote:
> > On 11-5-2010 2:10, Leo Razoumov wrote:
> >
> >   With respect to the macro language, it's not that bad for coding documents,
> > but Lua is definitely quite handy for extending the machinery. All aspects
> > of TeX are opened up successively but no large fundamental extensions are
> > written in c as one is supposed to use Lua.
>
> TeX macro language is an unmitigated disaster for writing macro packages.

well, i agree that some things are pretty hard to do in tex but keep in 
mind that its a typographical programming language and i'm quite sure 
that it was not meant as general purpose programming language but for 
writing styles for books; anyone who wants to write a general purpose 
macro package (dealing with all situations) goes beyond its intention

'disaster' is not the right qualification

> Arcane parsing of arguments, arbitrary restrictions, insane char code
> conventions turn simple things into complicated endeavors. No
> debugging support either. TeX macro language was a good choice for
> hardware in 1988 but now one can do much better. I do most of my
> writing in LaTeX and cry out every time I have to do a presentation
> with Beamer and animations:-)

maybe you should not use tex then; for animations you need specialized 
systems anyway and from the perspective of tex animations are just an 
abstraction

but one can of course make nice presentation styles using a mixture of 
lua and tex although the problem (solving) does not change (only the 
language)

> If Lua can help writing TeX packages that would put LyX like efforts
> on more solid footing.

it all depends on the kind of problems you want to solve and what input 
you have; personally i use xml, tex, lua and metapost mixed for coding 
input and defining styles (and by now quite some of the code of the 
macro package that i use is rewritten using lua and as luatex evolves i 
probably have to rewrite bits and pieces again)

anyway this list is not the place to discuss other languages than lua

Hans

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