[Dev-luatex] beta 0.20.0 released

[David Kastrup]

Hans Hagen <pragma at wxs.nl> writes:

> Jonathan Sauer wrote:
>
>> A book on dead trees? Considering the pace at which LuaTeX develops
>> (and most likely will continue to develop, considering above
>> roadmap), I wonder if this book will not either be in the stores too
>> late or out of date.
>
> well, at some point luatex will be pretty stable ... just like tex
> itself; what macro packages do with luatex is not part of that kin dof
> documentation

I think that would be a bad idea.  The TeXbook, for example, does not
restrict itself to documenting only primitives.  Instead, a reasonable
working macro set plainTeX (including allocation and user-level accent
generating macros and lots of other basic stuff built from primitives)
is the basis of the book throughout.

>> Who can only write code if they have the documentation.
>
> indeed, but look at good old tex ... eventually macro packages evolved
> that go way behind plain tex;

But plain TeX is a macro package, too.  It has become more or less
ubiquitous in its interface (though internals like \loop, \tt and other
stuff obviously are not the original definitions of plain TeX), but it
certainly still _is_ a macro package.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum