Re: [Texmacs-dev] (For the Wikipedia article) Algorithms and format

[Massimiliano Gubinelli]

Hi Giovanni

On 30. Nov 2020, at 13:56, Giovanni Piredda <pireddag@posteo.de> wrote:

and also it could be mentioned that there are other interesting systems like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software)<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software)>

which is a lazy functional description language for pages.

Thanks, I downloaded the system and looked at a few pages of the manual ... now I need to understand why it is a lazy functional description language, but that I have to postpone :-)

evaluation of macro arguments proceed "as needed", for example a macro can produce an infinite list of ".", but the consumer function can decide only to take a finite amount of them (for example to create the .... in a table of contents). In a funcitonal language with strict evaluaiton the infinite list would produce a loop. Similar behaviour in non-lazy languages is obtained via "promises", generators, etc..

Max