> On 16 May 2016, at 10:48, Hans Hagen <pra...@wxs.nl> wrote:
>>> interesting tex was flexible enough to survive many decades
>>
>> Other survivors are C, C++, Scheme. With TeX, change may start as with Lua,
>> only some better syntax for text input.
>
> that always depend on the content; for complex docs tex or xml is ok (and
> best)
The TeX syntax is too loose to do input that is close to the input. For
example, in math, if properly parsed, the "{…}” can often be replaced by the
normal “(…)”, and the the engine can decide to remove them when unnecessary, as
in say e^(x+y).
>> So such issues lead towards to the design of a new language, rather than
>> relying on an already existing.
>
> and then the not foreseen limitations in that language and ugly extensions
> spoil it ... (btw, the nice thing about lua is that it's so stable)
One might focus on different parts communicating via the semantics of the
underlying engine. Then with extensions, it is not necessary to know the syntax
of other additions when writing the code. This is roughly how pure math works,
and also the point extensible computer languages to get stuck on. And this is
alos how Lua was added ro TeX.
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the
Wiki!
maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________
