[Dev-luatex] REQ: Please tell comp.text.tex why LuaTeX chose embed rather than extend.
Hans Hagen
pragma at wxs.nl
Sun May 24 18:11:10 CEST 2009
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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Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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