Re: [Axiom-developer] TexFormat with latex output

[Eugene Surowitz]

My comments were motivated by Master Knuth's influence from reading TUGboat  vol.35 no.1 p.5 (see below)

"The TeX Tuneup of 2014".    Rather than suppressing creativity, a sound and stable platform base

enables it.  PanAxiom is not that yet.  The ")set" issue was the jumping off point to support that.

I see what you mean if someone wants to write an output routine that meets their needs;  no problem.

I doubt most people will be doing things like that;  stability first;  developers are another breed of cat.

Knuth:

The index to Digital Typography lists eleven pages where the importance of stability is stressed, and I urge all maintainers of TEX and 􏰋􏰉􏰎􏰈􏰊􏰍􏰌􏰎 to read them again every few years. Any object of nontrivial complexity is non-optimum, in the sense that it can be improved in some way (while still remaining non-optimum); therefore there’s always a rea- son to change anything that isn’t trivial. But one of TEX’s principal advantages is the fact that it does not change — except for serious flaws whose correction is unlikely to affect more than a very tiny number of archival doc- uments. 

Cheers, Gene

On Jun 27, 2014, at 5:05 PM, address@hidden wrote:

\begin{array} is the "native" LaTeX book invocation

of an "array" environment; if somebody has added

a "pmatrix" environment, I personally would avoid

using it in anything I wrote unless it is in the

current LaTeX2e (or beyond) standard.

Ralf is trying to do something constructive with documentation
and no solution is perfect. I think he should be given the
freedom to experiment. All of these complaints feel like
"bike-shedding".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike_shed

That said, anybody using Axiom tex/latex output would be expected
to \usepackage{axiom}. There are Axiom-specific commands that I
have written (such as the chunk environment) and I would expect
to be able to use them in output formats.

Tim