On Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 3:25 AM jkn <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm curious as to what you mean by this. Are you referring to the design of the TeX language?
The short answer: no, but this is an interesting question! The most important things to know about TeX: 1. It's never going to change. 2. It does what it was intended to do. 3. It is an important de facto standard. 4. LaTex hides the horrendous details. However, I was referring to the web language, which imo is a horror show. I think I am entitled to this opinion since I have spent about 40 years trying to do better :-) > I have more than once wondered what would have happened if 'TeX' had been written in something like Python (which came much later, of course)... The question I have been asking myself lately is whether there are unit tests for TeX that would allow re-implementations in other languages. Unit testing as a concept did not exist when Knuth created TeX, but such tests should be completely feasible. After all the tests would check that, given a TeX input, the *text *output matches expected output in one of several forms: dvi, svg, pdf, postscript. These kinds of text-to-text checks are the easiest form of unit tests. However, it would likely take at least a year to create tests that fully cover TeX. But is that a big deal? I think not, given the importance of TeX in the world. There may be such tests, but I haven't (yet) found evidence of them. Absent such tests, we are stuck with precompiled versions of the original TeX (in pascal!) program. But I could be mistaken about that. vs-code has a textab extension that's written in rust! I am busy installing lyx (and tex live) so I can see in what language lyx is written. And then there is the whole mathjax tool chain, which I'm guessing is built on top of TeX/LaTex. There are several LaTeX extensions for vs-code. *Summary* There has been *tremendous* progress in all areas since ca 1980, so without more research it's too early to say how easy it would be to make sense of tex.web :-) And let me emphasize that everything I have said here could be mistaken, in small or large ways! Edward -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/CAMF8tS0toVBHKPVPKTao0%3DbymEOvp8wYcUr_cv%3DF-%2BGPUDmR-Q%40mail.gmail.com.
