What's next after Leo?

[Edward K. Ream]

At last I have the mental space to consider what's next after Leo. I have delegated all routine maintenance mode projects to others.

Invention depends on juicy problems, so I have started to consider "hard" programming problems.

First problem solved

Several different teams have already solved the first problem that came to mind. The problem was, how to move TeX beyond pascal? We discussed this topic briefly last year.

The Wikipedia article cited above seems to discuss only the system that can be officially called Tex. In fact, extensions such as luaTeX and pdfTex replace Knuth's pascal-based TeX system. The Wikipedia article does mention these extensions, but you have to know where to look!

This morning I googled "Tex Test Suite". This search lead me to lua-test-suite.

Huh? Lua? Oh, I see, as in luaTeX. Eventually I found The Many Flavors of TeX. Obviously, the TeX world needs no help from me :-)

Summary

I now have space to look for juicy problems. Happily, TeX will not be involved. Otoh, the papers referenced in The Many Flavors of TeX make interesting reading.

Edward

P. S. The Many Flavors of TeX contains a great quote from Daniel J. Boorstin:

    Trying to plan for the future without a sense of history is like trying to plant cut flowers.

This quote seems like a pretty good guide for me right now.

EKR

[Edward K. Ream]

On Friday, April 22, 2022 at 6:06:34 AM UTC-5 Edward K. Ream wrote:

Several different teams have already solved the first problem that came to mind. The problem was, how to move TeX beyond pascal? We discussed this topic briefly last year.

Wow. Googling "What language is TeX written in" yields this page, containing:

QQQ
Originally, [TeX's] WEB source was translated into [a subset of] Pascal...via tangle to produce executable and translated into TeX via weave to produce documentation of the code. Both programs have themselves been written in WEB.

Today, TeXLive uses web2c to translate directly WEB source into C... via the Pascal source produced by tangle (web2c is not a Pascal to C translator).
QQQ

 How embarrassing: my initial project was a wild goose chase! Modern distros of TeX are based on C, not Pascal. This includes extensions such as luaTeX.

On the bright side, I can sleep a bit better now knowing that TeX does not depend on ancient Pascal compilers! At last I can put this silliness behind me!

Edward

[jkn]

Hi Edward

    FYI, there is also ConTeXt, to learn of/about: https://www.pragma-ade.com/

[Jacob Peck]

ConTeXt is my TeX flavor of choice.  Somewhere I have a makefile & Leo based ConTeXt workflow — once upon a time I was writing a couple books.

On Apr 22, 2022, at 3:11 PM, jkn <jkn...@nicorp.f9.co.uk> wrote:



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