Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: Hyperdoc

[C Y]

--- Martin Rubey <address@hidden> wrote:

> Furthermore, your idea of using lisp for everything sounds quite
> dangerous to me.  It sounds like: I don't really know what I'm
> going to do, but I'm going to use lisp.

Heh - that's usually a good situation in which to use Lisp, actually -
when you aren't sure what your going to do.  Lisp makes it very easy to
try many things quickly.

> And replacing LaTeX with some lisp typesetter is, in my opinion, the
> most stupid thing that could happen to axiom.

There are two ways to interpret that:

1.  Replace the LaTeX typesetting language with something based on
Lisp.

    I think we all agree this is not a good idea - this is not a point
of debate.  LaTeX as a documentation markup format has pretty well
stood the test of time, and extending it to support features it doesn't
currently have is almost routine (hyperref, xypic, pstricks, etc.)  We
don't need to switch away from LaTeX and there are good reasons not to.

2.  Replace the programs that translate LaTeX into other formats with
programs doing the same job, but written in Lisp.

    This is more my area of interest, and I don't know that anyone else
shares it - I think Tim might be innocent here ;-).  However, since
this wouldn't even be VISIBLE to anyone unless they were calling the
typesetting tools by hand (even now, doesn't the build wrap that in the
document script?) I don't see why anyone should be worried by
discussing the possibility.  The documents will be LaTeX, and LaTeX
won't go away - no one is forcing the use of a "lisp typesetter" (which
doesn't currently exist in usable form anyway.)  It's like with cl-web
- noweb is still there, and in fact even in the ASDF scenario it may be
possible to optionally use noweb for the pamphlet part of things (I'm
still wading through ASDF and CLOS documentation, but I think the
biggest single difficulty there would be calling noweb portably on
different platforms.)

Cheers,
CY


 
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