[Dev-luatex] Example: Sorting in LuaTeX

[Hans Hagen]

Jonathan Sauer wrote:

> Yes, but until LuaTeX is out of beta and widespread, it will be
> necessary to keep an implementation in TeX. So unless it really
> speeds things up, or makes better error handling possible, I do
> not see much use in parsing user input in Lua.
> 
> Or am I forgetting something?

Parsing user input which contains tex is kind of tricky anyway, for 
instance on needs to deal with braces, special characters (catcodes) etc 
that need to be fed back into tex (i.e. value of key stored in macro)

	bar={\foo{oeps $some math$}}

also the overhead may be a bit larger than normal (tex is not that slow).

It all depends on how downward compatible one wants to be. For special 
tasks it makes sense to do key/val parsing in lua, for others tex has to 
do the job (given that one has to operate within a certain macro package)

Hans

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
               Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
      tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
                                              | www.pragma-pod.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------