Thread-Topic: xparse
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Date:         Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:31:12 +0100
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From: "J.Fine" <J.Fine@OPEN.AC.UK>
Subject: Re: xparse
To: LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
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Status: R

Joseph wrote:

> J.Fine wrote:
> > Perhaps you'll find, when you remove 'TeX macros' from the requirements
> specification you'll find that it's better not to use TeX macros for the
> implementation.
>
> Fundamental point, of course, but the current plan is that LaTeX3 will
> work with pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX. If we were going down the ConTeXt
> "LuaTeX-only" route, then I'd quite possibly agree. But we're not (at
> the moment!).

You're claiming here that there is a requirement here to use TeX macros, namely use with pdfTeX etc.  But what you say does not impose such a requirement.

Don Knuth's WEB system uses a custom program WEAVE to create a TeX input file from a .web file.

It's perfectly possible to use a similar front end for processing documents written in the LaTeX syntax.

You snipped:
===
Surely to do this you will need a LaTeX->XML translator written in /some other language/.  And once you have that, why do you need an implementation written in TeX macros?

And come to that, the translator will surely want access to
> > \DeclareDocumentCommand \section { s o m } {
> >   % Code here
> > }
===

Any comments here?

--
Jonathan


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