Re: [Axiom-developer] Knuth's literate style

[Martin Rubey]

"Bill Page" <address@hidden> writes:

> I agree with all that but I think it is relevant to point out that TeX has
> not really survived the development of the World Wide Web - and interesting
> irony considering the coincidence of names. The current generation of web
> developers clear view TeX and LaTeX as anachronisms.

That may well be, but note that in the mathematical world, there is *only*
LaTeX, or among more conservative people, TeX or AmsTeX.

For example, the arXiv accepts other formats then TeX only very reluctantly.
All the large (math-) publishers use TeX for typesetting.  I have not yet been
to any conference which would accept something other than LaTeX source.  Even
wikipedia uses LaTeX style markup for math related entries.

What may be true is that TeX has not been successful in establishing itself as
a markup language for the WWW.  However, you have to keep in mind that only a
tiny fraction of the internet is made for math, and that's where TeX has its
main strength.

Since we are dealing with math, I guess there is no way around LaTeX for us.
Just keep in mind that, at least in the long run, our target audience are
mostly mathematicians, and those will also be our main contributors.  They all
know LaTeX, and I think that using some other markup language instead will
unnecessarily make the entry barrier higher.

Finally, I'd like to state that more important than talking about literate
programming is providing documentation, or, if you like, literate programming.
I think it's quite sad that so little documentation has been provided to the
algebra sources yet.  I think, one especially worthwhile project would be the
integration world.  Another one, maybe a lower hangig fruit, the factorization
routines.  There are excellent sources on the web (especially wikipedia), and
certainly documenting the factorization setup (especially the design of the
categories) will ease cleaning up those terrible bugs.

Martin