Re: Strange behavior of "root" in "over"'s context

[Giovanni Zezza]

Il Sat, 1 Jan 2000 22:42:44 +0300 (MSK), Tamas Papp scriveva:

>IMO, Lout should be treating these objects as boxes (as it does, after
>they are processed) and should not be used for creating them.
>...
>the solution for all the problems, but it's not. Look what it has done
>to TeX.

TeX *does* treat everything as boxes. What penalizes TeX isn't, in my
opinion, the intention to be a all-purpose thing, but the language design.
As a pragmatic linguist I don't completely agree about a formatting
language having to be so rigidly defined as Lout, but TeX is definitely too
poor and UNdefined as a language.

As to get something better, this is principally a matter of inertia.
The worth of a software tool isn't only in the tool per se, but in what it
has accumulated in its life, too. Up to now, neither Lout nor any other
system can win TeX's inertial mass (either in term of users or of written
software and documents); things may change as time go on, though.

Ciao.