Re: loops and if statements

[Jeff Kingston]

> Which brings me to another question; TeX is a programming language with
> loops, if statements, ... Lout doesn't seem to have such constructs
> (or am I mistaken?)  Why?

Lout offers @Case expressions which are a weak form of if statement, and
recursion which can be used to do some of the things that loops do.  I
left if statements out because I left Boolean expressions out, and I left
loops out because they don't fit into functional languages.

In the end you can't evaluate the utility of language features in
isolation, because so much depends on how they fit with the rest
of the language.  Lout concentrates on formatting, and leaves things
such as tracking the effect of chess moves to other programs.  It
does offer the @Filter symbol to smooth the path of integrating
other programs into the Lout world; you might want to look at that
for your chess example, it would allow you to embed chess games
into Lout documents and have Lout call your chess more tracker
as needed, rather than having to invoke it as a preprocessor.

Jeff