At 17:10 +0100 1999/12/08, Lars Hellström wrote: >>With much of the development of computer languages, there is the idea that >>the user should be forced to program in certain ways. >> >>TeX does not have such a mechanism that could put restraints of usage in >>say LaTeX. It would be great if TeX had such a capacity, but there is no >>point in taking up that aspect with TeX as it now is. > >At the risk of sounding like I would want to expel you Hans, I would like >to say that it seems to me that your energy would be better spent on >writing an alternative TeX front end within the framework of the NTS >project. :-) Not only is the creation of a completely new front end the >natural framework for introducing such ideas as lambda calculus and >probably also a more throrough implementation of namespaces, but it is also >the case that the modularity that the NTS project strive to achieve is most >likely helped if there are complete alternatives to each module. >Considering your predilection for OOP, it seems to me that you should find >the NTS project nice; as I understand it, they do OOP throughout. My guess is that when NFS arrives and becomes a standard replacing TeX, then the stuff developed within LaTeX can be done in a way that the input syntax is checked. (I am no longer on the NTS list I think, because I did not get any mail there for a long time.) But my guess is that LaTeX will need to make use of such ideas before that. Then one does ``objects'' which are simply not checked by TeX, but which has the capacity of carrying some of the structure that one wants to describe -- such as names localized into various kinds of namespaces (like classes) and programming with respect to interfaces. As for myself, I already decided to make my own computer program of a runtime model which understands lambda calculus. So I do not need any computer language in order to express my ideas (other than the language it is written in, currently C++). It is possible to download ideas from this runtime model to other contexts: For example, the idea with typed TeX ``objects'' comes from my model rather than from C++. If one uses dynamic objects, then the object which is considered the constructor of an object x can be identified with the (static) type of x. (Perhaps this idea is prevalent in Object C.) Hans Aberg