I'm happy to announce that my contribution to TUG 2012, the next TeX Users Group International conference, has been accepted. Please find the title and abstract below.
Star TeX, the Next Generation
In 2010, I asked Donald Knuth why he chose to design and implement TeX as a macro-expansion system (as opposed to more traditional procedure calls). His answer was that:
- he wanted something relatively simple for his secretary who was not a computer scientist,
- the very limited computing resources at that time practically mandated the use of something much lighter than a true programming language.
The first part of the answer left me with a slight feeling of skepticism. It remains to be seen that TeX is simple to use, and when or where it is, its underlying implementation has hardly anything to do with it.
The second part of the answer, on the other hand, was both very convincing and arguably now obsolete as well. Time has passed and the situation today is very different from what it was 50 years ago. The available computing power has grown exponentially, and so has our overall skills in language design and implementation.
Several ideas on how to modernize TeX already exist. Some have been actually implemented. In this talk, I will present mine. Interestingly enough, it seems to me that modernizing TeX can start with grounding it in an old yet very modern programming language: Common Lisp. I will present the key features that make this language particularly well suited to the task, emphasizing on points such as extensibility, scriptability and multi-paradigm programming. The presentation will include reflections about the software engineering aspects (internals), as well as about the surface layer of TeX itself. Most notably, I will explore the possibilities of providing a more consistent syntax to the TeX API, while maintaining backward compatibility with the existing code base.
