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Just to clarify: > TeX is used because it's a convenient interface between higher level descriptions… I think you mean LaTeX, not TeX. (LaTeX is a macro layer

by svat 7y ago

Just to clarify: > TeX is used because it's a convenient interface between higher level descriptions… I think you mean LaTeX, not TeX. (LaTeX is a macro layer on top of TeX that provides these convenient interfaces, while TeX is a low-level typesetter.) > Additionally, TeX is used rarely by humans… This sounds a bit contradictory with the previous statement, but maybe you mean that TeX is rarely used directly by many people (without LaTeX or some other macro layer). In any case, the LaTeX macros are implemented in TeX, so the TeX program is always the one being used (which I think was the point of the poster you're replying to). > And how many TeX and LaTeX reimplementation a are there? I didn't understand the meaning or point of this, as the answer is either "very few" or "many" depending on what you're counting. Extensions of the TeX program include eTeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX, not to mention a few others like pTeX and upTeX. (Confusingly, when we say “TeX” we often mean one of these programs as well, as a lot of their code comes from TeX—they are written/implemented as patches (changefiles).) Reimplementations of a small part of the TeX/LaTeX syntax for mathematical expressions (only) include MathJax and KaTeX. Are these a lot, or hardly any (would have expected a lot more)? Depends on your perspective I guess.

kragen 7y ago
Thank you! It's probably worth pointing out that nobody uses TeX bare without a LaTeX-like macro library. Knuth wrote his books with a macro library confusingly called "plain TeX", which ships with the TeX language interpreter. (That interpreter was the subject of this thread.) LaTeX relies on the plain TeX library, just as, for example, GLib relies on the C standard library. The third alternative popular TeX macro library for document formatting, other than plain TeX and LaTeX, is a thing called ConTeXt. It seems to me that ConTeXt is less popular than LaTeX, but more popular than plain TeX. But of course to invoke any of these you have to write code in TeX, just as to invoke Rails you have to write code in Ruby, or to invoke Numpy you have to write code in Python. As far as reimplementations, I think the only reimplementations were done at Stanford in the late 1970s as Knuth and his students wrote a series of prototypes, culminating in the TeX language we know today in 1983.

by svat 7y ago

kragen 7y ago

Thank you! It's probably worth pointing out that nobody uses TeX bare without a LaTeX-like macro library. Knuth wrote his books with a macro library confusingly called "plain TeX", which ships with the TeX language interpreter. (That interpreter was the subject of this thread.) LaTeX relies on the plain TeX library, just as, for example, GLib relies on the C standard library. The third alternative popular TeX macro library for document formatting, other than plain TeX and LaTeX, is a thing called ConTeXt. It seems to me that ConTeXt is less popular than LaTeX, but more popular than plain TeX. But of course to invoke any of these you have to write code in TeX, just as to invoke Rails you have to write code in Ruby, or to invoke Numpy you have to write code in Python. As far as reimplementations, I think the only reimplementations were done at Stanford in the late 1970s as Knuth and his students wrote a series of prototypes, culminating in the TeX language we know today in 1983.