Re: Nonpareil

[Jeff Kingston]

On Thu, 17 Oct 2002 08:40:03 +0200 (MEST), Robert Feldt wrote:
  > 
  > On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Jeff Kingston wrote:
  > 
  > > Nonpareil will be open source and completely free as usual.  Although it
  > > will benefit greatly from my seventeen years of document formatting
  > > experience with Lout, it will be a completely fresh start on different
  > > principles: a strongly typed, purely functional, object-oriented,
  > > general-purpose language, with both batch and wysiwyg interfaces.
  > >
  > Very interesting. Is there a time-plan?
  > 
  > Regards,
  > 
  > Robert Feldt

Sure.  Start at the beginning and keep working until the end.

I started Lout in 1985 and released the first version (very
primitive as far as end user features go) in 1991.  But I
was a full-time academic staff member during that time.  I
would guess that two years full time would have done it.
So my hope is that two years from now I will have something
worth releasing, the kernel, and that after that it will be
a question of adding user-level features, basically forever.
Quite a lot of the later work has been more complex that it
should have been - I've found that when new features are
needed that build on the good parts of Lout, they take very
little time, but when they build on the bad parts they take
a lot longer.  So clearly the smart approach will be to make
sure that the kernel of Nonpareil has absolutely no bad parts.

Jeff Kingston