Star TeX : the Next Generation

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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 is mixed with a full-blown programming language. This paper advocates another, homogeneous approach in which TeX is first rewritten in a modern language, cl, 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.


Bibtex (lrde.bib)

@InProceedings{	  verna.12.tug,
  author	= {Didier Verna},
  title		= {Star {\TeX}: the Next Generation},
  booktitle	= {TUGboat},
  year		= 2012,
  editor	= {Barbara Beeton and Karl Berry},
  volume	= 33,
  number	= 2,
  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 is
		  mixed with a full-blown programming language. This paper
		  advocates another, homogeneous approach in which \TeX{} is
		  first rewritten in a modern language, \cl, 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.}
}