Hello, Frank Mittelbach wrote: > i think that is saddling the horse from the tail. if you look at the > way Lamport originally wrote LaTeX you will find that he used a pascal > like peudo code Oh, it's interesting! Was that implementation able to deal with mathematics? > and later on translated it into TeX (and sometimes got > the TeX interpeter changed or enhanced because he asked Don something > that wasn't possible. > > so execpt for the moment that there is an abstract LaTeX language and > it is defined by the LaTeX manual. and even if one of its interpreter > (TeX) allows to use constructs outside of it this doesn't mean that > they are part of the language, it only means that such documents are > not latex documents (only that we don't mind much as long as we all > use the same interpreter. Ok. Probably, my point of view on LaTeX is limited. Of course, the authors of LaTeX can specify, what is the `real' LaTeX syntax, and may want the others to look at LaTeX as to an abstract language (even not TeX-related). > but your point that there is only one such interpreter is simply > wrong. there is, for example, a voice rendering system that turns > latex including math and all into speech --- very impressive in fact, > and it deals with the full latex language as defined above. I did not see this system :-) Is it available at CTAN? With best regards, Vladimir.