Re: Pushing the limits [useless]

[Samuel Lacas]

Jeff Kingston a écrit 1.2K le Thu, Nov 01, 2001 at 08:19:47AM +1100:
# So now I think that programming languages and document
# formatting systems are not as different in that way as I once did.  Lout
# struggles to offer features relevant to modelling documents; object-oriented
# languages struggle to offer features relevant to modelling objects.  It's
# pretty much the same struggle.

Hi, 
I indeed did not understood your point then. Please be assured that my
"smiling" about your sentence had nothing to do with mockery. 
I think I quite agree with you on the modelling issue. The main reason
I got interested with Lout is its (or your :) attempt to have a rather
abstract view of document formatting concepts, compared to the purely
operational semantic of other batch processors, which describe not the
core operators of the language but the formatting algorithm. I don't
know if I'm clear enough here. I mean, I feel you don't have to
understand the galley flushing algorithm to define your own
description of a document or your macros; what you have is a (small)
functional language together with formatting directives (at least, it
is the way I understand it). Compare it to, say, to TeX, where you have to
dive really deep into the automaton (I refer to the mouth-stomach
metaphor of token consumption) to do anything else than reusing other
ones' macros.

sL