[Texmacs-dev] Re: [TeXmacs] New paper on TeXmacs

[David G. Wonnacott]

   Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 20:17:21 +0200
   From: Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>
   Cc: address@hidden

   Just to announce a new paper on TeXmacs:

           http://www.texmacs.org/Samples/texmacs.pdf

   Any comments are welcome,

   Joris


As per my recent emails to this list, I myself am rather focused on
features for extending TeXmacs at this time. It looks like this paper
contains a good overview of what is possible (macros and scheme
functions) and a pointer to the help menus where one can get more
details, but speaking as someone new to extending TeXmacs (but
familiar with extending emacs and LaTeX), I would also like to see:

1) Something about how to learn what functions I can call from
   scheme. I know I can use things that I can type with "\" when I
   build macros, but I'm not sure how to figure out

   a) what I can call from scheme -- I've been using the "help" menu
      to search source code; is there a better way?

   b) whether (and how) I can call back into the macro language from a
      scheme function

   It may be that these details belong only in the "help" menu, but
   they also have a bearing on the question below, so I thought I'd
   start with them.

2) A sentence or two about the relative limitations of the two
   mechanisms (macros vs. scheme) -- how do I decide which to use? In
   emacs, I write just about everything in emacs lisp; in TeXmacs, I
   can do simple combinations of existing features as a macro, or more
   serious programming and configuration of the menus from scheme.
   This is stated in a clear and concise way at the start of Sections
   7.1 and 7.2.  But I'm not sure if there are other factors that
   should be influencing my choice between these two mechanisms. In
   particular, it seems that I can't easily just go to doing
   everything in scheme because:

   a) It seems that one can embed a macro or two at the start of a
      document, but that scheme programs _must_ be put in separate
      files and installed in the proper part of the file system and
      then requested properly from the document. So simple things that
      are only needed in one document are much more easily done as
      macros.

   b) If the answer to "b" above is "no", I can't use scheme for
      things that need to call back into stuff that's not available
      (or things that I can't locate) in scheme.

   It might be nice to have a sentence or two about which mechanism
   should be used for what purposes.

These concerns are obivously heavily biased toward the things that
I've been trying to figure out recently; I won't take offense if you
don't address them in the paper, but you did ask for comments, so
there you have them :-)

All in all, it's nice to see more documentation that I can use to
introduce other folks to TeXmacs (I've forwarded the URL's for this
document and Henri's page to a colleague already).

Dave Wonnacott

P.S. regarding my "My first non-trivial macro" email of last
     Wednesday, can you shed any light on the question of why

        <include|<example-file-name|hello>>

     works (from the latest CVS version) but

        
<assign|in-ex|<macro|ex-name|<include|<example-file-name|<arg|ex-name>>>>>

     doesn't?