J.Fine skrev: > Using TeX macros are the only programming language for building > LaTeX3 is largely a self-imposed restriction. No one else is, with all > seriousness, building such a complicated system with such a primitive > programming language. (Please correct me if I'm wrong here.) What about autoconf, automake, and friends? My impression is that M4 is a tad more primitive than TeX... As for the TeX macro language: Yes, it is corny, and has some rather odd restrictions in places, but it has over the years proven itself to be surprisingly versatile. Moreover, it is a language where the fine details have generally come out exactly right (alignments may be the exception proving this rule), whereas there are plenty of languages out there which have only gotten their fine details half right, despite being created as serious programming languages. I doubt the TeX macro language will ever go away (any engine driving LaTeX will be required to support almost all of it), but its importance may decrease if the implementations of specific features are migrated to an intermediate scripting level;[*] from the TeX macro language point of view, this would merely be equivalent to LaTeX taking advantage of new primitives that are added to the language. [*] I believe this is the LuaTeX approach. See also Ousterhout's dichotomy. Lars Hellström