“Look, how hard could it be to just write my own typesetting code?” —everyone who has ever tried to make LaTeX do something other than the hideous default
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Replying to @Meaningness
Of course these were people who weren't aware that TeX as a programming language was design to be Turing-minimal or something, with ZERO support for even the most rudimentary abstract constructions! Like programming in Malbolge.
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Replying to @handleym99 @Meaningness
It doesn't help that (sure, sound historical reasons...) none of the conventions are in any way related to the rest of the tech world. OK, I need a math symbol here -- what's the unicode for that? WTF do you mean it doesn't use Unicode? 1/
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Replying to @handleym99 @Meaningness
It swaps in racks of 256-long arrays of characters, like a cave-man DOS overlay? You can NOT be serious? And it's all built on top of that??? //
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Replying to @handleym99
It’s pretty strange that there hasn’t been a replacement.
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Replying to @Meaningness
Yeah, a long chain of augmentations, from pdftex through luatex and xetex, but no-one said "to heck with this; let's reimplement the DDL and algorithms on top of a much easier to use basis". If nothing else, seems like a more useful geek project than creating yet another language
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Replying to @handleym99 @Meaningness
There are many TeX replacements with “proper” programming languages, Unicode support, and what not. But none ever caught in as the TeX replacement because it seems users value backward compatibility over breaking change. https://texfaq.org/FAQ-alternatives …
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