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Joachim Schrod <[log in to unmask]>
Tue, 8 Jul 2003 19:33:42 +0200
text/plain (40 lines)
>>>>> "TM" == Timothy Murphy <[log in to unmask]> writes:

TM> Knuth was right 99.9% of the time.

Well, $99.9\% \pm \epsilon$ for a quite large $\epsilon$ depending on
which part of TeX you look at.

In particular, the macro language is not only dreadful, but may be
called "the most horrible macro language after the C preprocessor"
with full rights.

That's why the ant work of Achim is so interesting, including his
distinction between markup and programming syntax.[*] It's an open
question if O'Caml programs are really good for this problem domain
(I'm not really convinced), but the framework is powerful enough to
plug in other style sheets and to experiment with it.

Cheers,
        Joachim

[*] Disclaimer: I'm biased here and think that ant has not got the
acknowledgement in the TeX community it deserves. All talk about NTS,
and here we have a system with concepts that is better already. The
concepts are nearer towards the original goals for NTS, too. Actually,
one of my employees, Gerd Stolpmann, spends quite some of his work
time on O'Caml software and I hope to be able to combine some of his
work (e.g., on PXP, a blasting fast and powerful XML parser, see
http://www.ocaml-programming.de/programming/pxp.html) with components
from ant some day. But I digress, that get's off topic too much.


--
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Joachim Schrod                                  Email: [log in to unmask]
Roedermark, Germany

        ``How do we persuade new users that spreading fonts across the page
        like peanut butter across hot toast is not necessarily the route to
        typographic excellence?''                       -- Peter Flynn

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