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Why is that an important distinction? It's not clear to me that it is.
by code_biologist 4y ago
Why is that an important distinction? It's not clear to me that it is.
- kragen 4y agoSee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32350841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32350841.
- Shorel 4y agoIt is not. And it is irrelevant, because the objective here is to produce good-looking documents, not to create or run programs.
- choeger 4y agoIt is. People get confused all the time when their "compilation" of a TeX "document" doesn't terminate or yields other typical runtime problems. LaTeX is a very leaky abstraction in that regard. For more than basic competence in using TeX, it is important to understand how it works internally and for that it is helpful to have an understanding of what an interpreter is.
- Shorel 4y agoI disagree. I don't need to know the compiled opcodes of a Java program to know that I wrote code that tries to perform a division by zero. What I need is a clear explanation of the issue using the actual source code I wrote. That's it. Whatever does this job, a compiler, an interpreter, random fairies, quantum AI overlords, it is not relevant. Clear error messages that show my source code, and explain the issue, that's the answer to fix these typical runtime problems.