Jonathan Fine
Hans Hagen wrote:
well, you made a remark and david's responded, so the discussion is now two mails long
anyhow, if it's so off topic (and david's mail was quite on-the-topic that you started), then why did you made your remark in the first place;
To answer your question, briefly.
In my view, my remark (on proliferation of pseudo-TeXs) was relevant
How so? We are on the LuaTeX developer list. It is quite useless to argue about the prudence of its existence either way.
and David's remark (on worship of Donald Knuth) was not.
You quoted Knuth as a reverence on changing/extending TeX. And we just have heard on this list > I'm just curious: Did Yazdipur try to communicate with the Omega > developers and offer patches etc? I do not think so, It seems that he has got no interest in the Unicode world and he is a big fan of Knuth's TeX engine only and does not want to write codes for PDFTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX. So yes, I do think that it is quite on-topic for the problem at hand to point out that it is taking veneration too far when one tries using only an 8-bit-font capable TeX with only built-in L-R typesetting capabilities in this manner. If there is one thing Knuth's example should teach people is that for best results, you use the best-suited system and if there is none that can in a reasonable way do the job, you build the best-suited system yourself. And that's what LuaTeX is growing into. Now the style in which this happens is different from Knuth's: he designed and later coded the whole thing in its WEB incarnation (strictly speaking, the second generation) on paper, and basically hacked it into the computer in one piece during a month of work. In contrast, LuaTeX development is filling in some of the blanks while development is going on: there has not been a "we want to typeset this particular document, and now plan everything necessary for this document before starting to code" phase. And for a much more general-purpose system, I find this approach reasonable, even though it may cost a few dead ends.
Having answered your question, I'm happy for this discussion to end.
Same here. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum