Re: [Texmacs-dev] Lisp/TeX/TeXmacs was: Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: gcl, shared libraries

[Henri Lesourd]

Ralf Hemmecke wrote:

> TeX is admittedly a strange language, but I don't think that that 
> TeXmacs is any easier.

Honestly, TeX is an horror, you don't even have the possibility to
name local variables, you have only a fixed number of registers,
like in assembly language ! By the way, exactly what TeX is is
an assembly language.

As far as TeXmacs macro language is concerned, I don't know
if it is easier, but at least is a much cleaner and high level language,
which is meant to be as functional as possible (although functional
programming doesn't solves all the problems, but it is another debate).


> I've browsed through the documentation yesterday, and I was a little 
> surprised to find out that the style language of TeXmacs is not Scheme 
> (basically it is, but with a few differences). Yet another reason why 
> TeXmacs is not well accepted by the community. It is simply too hard 
> to have your old knowledge in your head (by which you can do things in 
> LaTeX (maybe not the Wysiwyg/m way)) and you would have to find the 
> appropriate commands in the TeXmacs manual. Often guessing just works, 
> but if not, you are stuck and that is more than frustrating.
> (Just my recent experiences with TeXmacs.)
>
> To be more precise. I wanted to define some TeXmacs macros as they are 
> described in the manual (Help->Manual->Writing your own style files).
>
> Entering
>
> <assign|hello|<macro|name|Hello <person|<arg|name>>!>>
>
> as it is described there nearly drove me crazy. I did not get the 
> "person" macro entered as it was described just below that box.
> (Even if I am to stupid to read clearly and follow the manual, I find 
> it quite hard to learn the "new" way. And that is frustrating. :-(  )
What you need is perhaps a more focussed and user-friendly kind
of documentation. You should at least try:
http://www.ags.uni-sb.de/~henri/texmacs/aTeXmacsTutorial.pdf

, all the people who used this as an introduction to TeXmacs programming
learned very quickly what needs to be known (the point is : the number
of things to know is *small*).


> Hello TeXmacs, developers. I am certainly not the most usual user, so 
> you probably can ignore my comments. But I actually intended to add 
> (or help to add) some literate programming support to TeXmacs. My 
> experience from yesterday night really let's me think twice about 
> whether I should invest my time into TeXmacs. There is so many things 
> to do (LP support, syntax highlighting, indentation support, 
> (automatic hyperlinking between source files, I haven't yet seen a 
> "back" button so that I could use TeXmacs as a source code browser) 
> and I find it overly hard to achieve something myself in a reasonable 
> amount of time.
You should first give a try to the tutorial above : although
it remains incomplete, it has exactly been written for solving
the kinds of learning problem you are describing now.


Best, Henri