Re: Uwe's thoughts on @Graphic

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Fri, Mar 19, 1999 at 08:55:28AM +1000, Jeff Kingston wrote:

> of them into Lout would be a radical change.  I think that with
> large, mature software systems one has to accept that they have
> been designed up to certain limits, and that it won't be fruitful
> to try to push them beyond those limits.

The observation I'm trying to communicate is that the left parameter
of @Graphics is really a constant expression (since things like xsize
are really defined by Lout immediately before emiting that left
parameter.  So even if the code contains loos or conditionals it can
be "flattened".

Side effects are tougher to handle, but they are confined to a single
page (or, ideally, should be) which makes that manageable too.

So what I'm thinking about is a sort of a flattener/distiller for a
subset of PostScript.  This will not change anything for the Lout or
the user (execept subsetting the accepted language) and will just work
quitely behind the scene.  OTOH, the @Graphics is not supposed to be a
kitchen sink, so it should be possible to keep the subset simple and
managebale while still useful (i.e. enough to support @Diag and @Graph).

SY, Uwe
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