On 5/7/2013 5:57 PM, David Kastrup wrote:
Actually, one of such people is a major financial backer of my ongoing work on LilyPond since working on beating consistency into a programming model that was a loose connection of independent hacks at one point of time was what empowered increasingly effective work of his. That's what the "It is whole now as if it had never been broken." quote at the start of the article was about.
one thing that users seems to forget is that one can take luatex, extend it for some special purpose, without wondering what side effects it could have for stock usage (using libraries is possible with lua, extending the tex parser is also an option) ... it's way better to follow that route than adding more and more to luatex (after all: one of the design decisions was to stick as close as possible to the original; i can easilly see where for instance context can benefit from some extensions but it could hamper other macro packages, apart from the fact that there would never be consensus)
The Lua -> TeX route is better covered at the moment, take e.g. ConTeXt's CLD files and Patrick's typesetting engine that is almost completely lua-based.
But Context's CLD files are not part of the LuaTeX mindframe/universe to any serious degree. You never learn what they are by reading the LuaTeX
well, the same if true for anything tex ... one has to play with it ... of course one can read the cld manual in this case, but why should one; it's just one of the solutions we should not go along the route of traditional tex packages: at some point latex (and amsmath) was made into a de facto standard, interesting when there were better variants around (lamstex, inrstex to mention a few) ... so we will not suggest a solution ... although context is definitely the main driving force behind luatex, it doesn't mean we want to impose the way it's used
manual. So their ways of doing work are Context's ways of doing work, not LuaTeX's ways of doing work.
nor would any extension of the tex parser be ... that would also be someone's interpretation
The LuaTeX manual at the current point of time is as relevant for resolving the question "why would I _want_ to use LuaTeX?" as a proof that you can use it for implementing some particular class of Turing machine. It shows more abstract capabilities rather than actual application programming strategies.
indeed, but that has always be the case with tex ... too many ways to solve the issue ... and i honestly believe that if i would provide (generic) solutions they would still not be accepted as generic anyway
Now it is nice that somewhere there are also answers to the question "why would I _want_ to use Context?". But treating them as separately important from the question "why would I want to use LuaTeX?" might expand the number of people interested in LuaTeX.
we didn't choose lua because of examples i saw (for which i have no time anyway) ... just because the overal appeal of the language we cannot answer the question why to use luatex, in fact, if someone does not come from the tex universe there are probably many reasons for not using tex anyway (as it might be overkill) ... i know that some companies have these 'evangelists' running around selling the langauge and system, but it always makes me somewhat suspicious Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------