[Dev-luatex] REQ: Please tell comp.text.tex why LuaTeX chose embed rather than extend.

[Hans Hagen]

Jonathan Fine wrote:

> Please would you supply URLs explain why the LuaTeX team chose to embed 
> rather than extend.

tugboat, maps, gust magazine, dtk, context mailing list/meetings, etc; i 
have no clue what is online or not (nor time to figure it out)

we extend tex by embedding lua so i don't see the point unless you mean 
that we'd extend lua with tex which never has been an issue at all

as mentioned in the prev mail .. the starting point is simply tex and 
extending tex as tex macropackages is what users use and we float on the 
  waves of the tex cummunity and distributions

also, i don't want in retrospect to give the impression that we had (10 
year lasting and thereby ending up into nothing) endless discussions; 
just to mention one argument that i presenbted in talks and articles 
right from the start:

i ran into lua when i played with adding fuctionality to scite (editor), 
then after some mail exchanges hartmut hacked something similar into tex 
and we played with it for a while, then taco, hartmut and i decided to 
set the next steps and open op more and more of tex to lua (the 
extension language) and luatex was born .. we liked it so much that we 
went that route and never regret it (as it fits nicely into regular tex 
/ macro writing  as well as puts no burden on distributions and users)

there is not much more to tell and the shortest answer possible really 
is: we found this quite natural and liked it; of course i can cook up 
arguments afterwards and add philosophical or pseudo scientific motives; 
we keep a history of the developments (mostly published) where decisions 
etc etc are argumented so that's the definite reference

Hans

(of course after the first experiments and along the route we saw more 
possibilities and got more ideas about the future but that's irrelevant 
here)

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