"""The price of a LaTeX rewrite would be even higher: incompatibility."""
Yeah. The only benefit is a codebase that reflects current needs and can grow in new directions and follow current practices, that programmers of today are familiar with. And also be faster, and more flexible. But what are those compared to compatibility right?
(Of course people interested in pure compatibility could just continue to use the old version, until the new is compatible enough, or they don't need compatibility anymore).
"""If one tries to rewrite TeX, the problem gets much much worse, since TeX is, for all intents and purposes, bug-free."""
And your wrong assumption is a) that a problem has to be bug free to be useful or b) that a new effort can't produce a relatively bug free codebase?
And your wrong assumption is a) that a problem has to be bug free to be useful or b) that a new effort can't produce a relatively bug free codebase?
How are either of those requirements wrong? I certainly expect my programs to be bug free. LaTeX is a tool that's older than many GNU utilities. It's been reviewed and tested numerous times over by the harshest test suite of all: the real world.
Yes, in theory, you could rewrite TeX to be cleaner, while maintaining backwards compatibility and lack of bugs and regressions. In practice, this is very very hard. It's so hard that no one, no individual or company has managed to pull it off.
But hey, who knows? You could be the first. The LaTeX codebase is open-source. If you think you can pull off what the most talented software engineers in the world haven't been able to do, go right ahead.
"""How are either of those requirements wrong? I certainly expect my programs to be bug free."""
Good luck with that. What I said, though, was that "a problem has to be bug free to be useful" is a wrong assumption. We all use programs that have bugs, and still found them immensely useful.
"""Yes, in theory, you could rewrite TeX to be cleaner, while maintaining backwards compatibility and lack of bugs and regressions. In practice, this is very very hard. It's so hard that no one, no individual or company has managed to pull it off."""
What are you talking about? Tons of people have written TeX versions of their own, even in Lua, and most of those are widely used.
"""But hey, who knows? You could be the first."""
Hardly. There is LuaTex, XeTeX (even more widely used) and others. Are you just talking out of your ass? (Not to mention several other modern typesetting engines that are not TeX based. You make it sound like TeX is an impossible achievement).
Now, what I said I'd like to see was not a rewriting of TeX itself, but a modern version of a TeX like engine, with or without compatibility. Programs like XeTeX and Omega for example provide Unicode support and TTF/OT support to TeX, but I'd like to see something more modular, and with a more streamlined markup than TeX+LaTeX. While we're at it, even scriptable.
There are also some improvements found since in typesetting, like those employed in the InDesign layout engine concerning edge text and hyphenation.
Both LuaTeX and XeTeX have the original TeX code at their core, so they are not bottom-up rewrites.
The purpose and benefit of backward compatibility for TeX is that a 30 year old manuscript written in TeX can be fed to the latest version and produce identical output to what was produced 30 years ago. (Of course, you'd also have to archive the macro packages and font files you were using, but those were never machine dependent).
Thanks. A have given lout a look in the past, but I though it wasn't actively developed anymore. I also liked Prince, but it is proprietary unfortunately.
Don't you think intelligent people have better things to do than to rewrite old code, just because Apple's platform lacks important features that have been well-known for several decades?
The notion that every time we have a new language/platform, we must REWRITE THE WORLD!! is absurd and a huge waste of resources. We should stop making excuses for it.
"""Don't you think intelligent people have better things to do than to rewrite old code, just because Apple's platform lacks important features that have been well-known for several decades?"""
Yeah, you probably missed the whole point of the comment, TFA, and several other stuff besides.
It's not Apple's platform that's the problem, is TeX/LaTeX that is lacking important features. In EVERY platform.
People have been hacking them on to it, but having a better codebase to start off, without the assumptions TeX/LaTeX make would really make it so much easier.
"""The notion that every time we have a new language/platform, we must REWRITE THE WORLD!! is absurd and a huge waste of resources."""
Yeah, good thing that nobody suggested anything like that in the thread.
Btw, the notion that you can add your worthless reply without first understanding what the parent poster says is absurd. You should stop making excuses for it.
Yeah. The only benefit is a codebase that reflects current needs and can grow in new directions and follow current practices, that programmers of today are familiar with. And also be faster, and more flexible. But what are those compared to compatibility right?
(Of course people interested in pure compatibility could just continue to use the old version, until the new is compatible enough, or they don't need compatibility anymore).
"""If one tries to rewrite TeX, the problem gets much much worse, since TeX is, for all intents and purposes, bug-free."""
And your wrong assumption is a) that a problem has to be bug free to be useful or b) that a new effort can't produce a relatively bug free codebase?