Star TeX: the Next Generation
Type
Event
Date
Jul 16, 2012 — Jul 18, 2012
Location
Omni Parker House
60 School Street, Boston, MA 2108
Abstract
While TeX is unanimously praised for its typesetting capabilities, it is
also regularly blamed for its poor programmatic offerings. A macro-expansion
system is indeed far from the best choice in terms of general-purpose
programming. Several solutions have been proposed to modernize TeX on the
programming side. All of them currently involve a heterogeneous approach in
which TeX is mixed with a full-blown programming language. This paper
advocates another, homogeneous approach in which TeX is first rewritten
in a modern language, Common Lisp, which serves both at the core of the
program and at the scripting level. All programmatic macros of TeX are
hence rendered obsolete, as the underlying language itself can be used for
user-level programming.