2 ms·
While TeX is great, the language is really get long in the tooth. Had amazing fun this morning, trying to put a \begin{verbose}...\end{verbose} section inside
by CJefferson 16y ago
While TeX is great, the language is really get long in the tooth.
Had amazing fun this morning, trying to put a \begin{verbose}...\end{verbose} section inside another command, getting the most insane error messages. In the end I just gave up, and wrote things a different way.
- eru 16y agoInitially, TeX wasn't meant to be scriptable. It was Guy Steele who convinced Knuth to make TeX an extensible fully programmable language. So if it wasn't for Guy Steele, we wouldn't have e.g. LaTeX written in TeX macros, but perhaps as a pre-processor.
- _delirium 16y agoThe typesetting/layout itself also seems like it could be improved, especially given modern computing hardware. Better control over it would be nice anyway. As it is, trying to get figure placement, line-breaking, and page layout to look nice is a crazy trial-and-error-and-magic-constants exercise, and the results in a lot of cases still end up suboptimal. I'm not too sure why, but there hasn't been a lot of experimentation with it really. I think the figure-placement algorithm is still the same sort-of-works-but-not-really one that Knuth had a student working on improving circa 1980; the student's dissertation proved that optimal pagination was NP-complete instead of improving the algorithm. :P ConTeXt is an interesting experiment that seems to be making some improvements, though.