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Date:         Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:16:42 +0200
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Lars_Hellstr=F6m?= <Lars.Hellstrom@RESIDENSET.NET>
Subject: Re: xparse
To: LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
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Status: R

J.Fine skrev:
> Using TeX macros are the only programming language for building
> LaTeX3 is largely a self-imposed restriction.  No one else is, with all
> seriousness, building such a complicated system with such a primitive
> programming language.  (Please correct me if I'm wrong here.)

What about autoconf, automake, and friends? My impression is that M4 is 
a tad more primitive than TeX...

As for the TeX macro language: Yes, it is corny, and has some rather 
odd restrictions in places, but it has over the years proven itself to 
be surprisingly versatile. Moreover, it is a language where the fine 
details have generally come out exactly right (alignments may be the 
exception proving this rule), whereas there are plenty of languages out 
there which have only gotten their fine details half right, despite 
being created as serious programming languages.

I doubt the TeX macro language will ever go away (any engine driving 
LaTeX will be required to support almost all of it), but its importance 
may decrease if the implementations of specific features are migrated 
to an intermediate scripting level;[*] from the TeX macro language 
point of view, this would merely be equivalent to LaTeX taking 
advantage of new primitives that are added to the language.

[*] I believe this is the LuaTeX approach. See also Ousterhout's dichotomy.

Lars Hellström