Re: more LaTeX (was: Re: emacs and beginning of lines)

[Emanuel Berg]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl> writes:

>> When I wrote what you quote, I meant
>> general-purpose, like C. But now that you say it,
>> LaTeX offers a borderline case: the programming
>> parts of it, I don't want to be filled, but I want
>> the text part of it to be (perhaps with the
>> modification I suggested).
>
> How do you decide which is which?

It has to be based on where the point is and what is
before/after it.

> Doesn't the difference between TeX and HTML you mean
> here lie in the fact that TeX is Turing-complete and
> HTML is not?

Well, Turing-complete is CS lingo and I only did CS at
the university... But what I remember is that it wasn't
easy to apply those paradigms and classification to
technology, not then and not now. Feel free to try,
tho.

No, I think HTML isn't programming because of the lack
of algorithms. HTML is also domain-specific, marking-up
text so that it can be displayed and interlinked in
certain ways. But where you can do seemingly anything
in LaTeX HTML is very limited when it comes to logic
and "execution" flow. It is just a 1:1 textual
representation of what will turn up in the browser. But
actually that doesn't have to be bad. I like static web
pages that only present textual material, with a couple
of images, and a link to the "next" section. So even
though LaTeX seems to be much more powerful than HTML,
I don't wish for a "LaTeX-web"...

> And there are a few numerical engines, a few drawing
> libraries, one regex library and *a lot* of other
> things /programmed/ in TeX.

Yes. This is the coolest thing I did in LaTeX:

http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/about/matte.pdf

(But it doesn't contain anything dynamic.)

But, I did a CV once which used this chunk of code
(which I didn't wrote) to automatically update my age
(ha! how depressing to have to do that each year while
the rest of the CV stays the same...)

http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/latex/year.tex

But it is a good example. I think the programming in
LaTeX is good, and probably it will be the most useful
with and around documents and typesetting.

> (I read an article about some LaTeX code generating
> tests in differential equations. With solutions.
> Though it didn't actually solve them, it first chose
> the solutions (pseudo-randomly) and then generated an
> equation with that very solution.) So while it is
> indeed a domain-specific language, it /can/ be
> coerced to doing really strange things.

Yeah, it reminds me of groff (roff) which is also like
that. But just because you can do lots in both doesn't
mean a more modern solution isn't preferable all the
same (like C, walkie-talkies, and e-mails).

-- 
underground experts united