Re: [Texmacs-dev] Roadmap porting TeXmacs and the TMGUI API

[Joris van der Hoeven]

> I had to get the architecture right. Dealing with the main loop is a
> prerequisite for the rest.  About CVS, I don't care much. I am not in
> ingremental mode yet.

I understand, but it would be good if you already make available
what you have now. This will facilitate discussions and maybe we will
have some good ideas for you. I understand that you do not want to
work with CVS all the time, but it would be nice if you make your
latest version available every two weeks or so. Would that be OK with you?

> Once I get something working I send a patch.  I
> am eagerly waiting to have avanced enough so that TeXmacs will make
> CVS altogether obsolete.  Program are trees after all and TeXmacs
> native structures are trees too.

Completely agreed, but we are not there yet,
so we have to do with the tools at our disposal...

> > > I have not figured out yet how it work.
> > 
> > You should also specify a width for the cell.
> 
> This is very much what I feared.  a web browser is able to figure out
> the best size of the cells when they are not indicated one way or another.

You can also specify a widths of 1par or 0.5par to span over the paragraph
width or half of it.

> > > Once I know it is working I
> > > can write a filter.  Perl is the language for that kind of thing.
> > 
> > I am not sure; I think that filters naturally decompose into two parts:
> > a string-manipulation part (mainly parsing, output generation being easy),
> > for which Perl is probably the best choice, and a tree-manipulation part,
> > for which Guile is probably better.
> 
> I see no problem for a filter to generate TeXmacs documents. In that
> case, it has not to know about TeXmacs trees. If the document is fed
> to TeXmacs, it eventually should be able to display it progressively
> like I said with incoming HTML.
> 
> This is a cultural problem too. You will find more easily Perl/Python/Ruby 
> programmers
> than Guile programmers.

Yes, but that is very dependent on trends; maybe next year
this will be the inverse. One has to try to use the best tool
for each kind of purpose. Perl is good on string manipulation.
Guile is good on tree manipulation.