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No, TeX is not a compiler by a common sense of a compiler (unless you say it compiles to PDF). TeX's input grammer can change during the TeX run, so I believe
by patrickg 10y ago
No, TeX is not a compiler by a common sense of a compiler (unless you say it compiles to PDF).
TeX's input grammer can change during the TeX run, so I believe it is impossible to make an equivalent of LLVM (unless I misunderstand the concept of LLVM).
- haberman 10y ago> No, TeX is not a compiler by a common sense of a compiler (unless you say it compiles to PDF). That is exactly what I am saying. > TeX's input grammer can change during the TeX run, so I believe it is impossible to make an equivalent of LLVM The important part is not the grammar, but the internal representation. I don't know enough about TeX to know much about its internal representation post-parsing.
- Kristine1975 10y ago> I don't know enough about TeX to know much about its internal representation post-parsing. IIRC it's a stream of tokens. A token can be a character, a built-in command, a macro etc. During processing of this token stream macros are "expanded", i.e. replaced with their definition (recursively). It is possible to control this expansion process using built-in commands.