Hi Giovanni,
On Mon, Nov 30, 2020 at 01:56:13PM +0100, Giovanni Piredda wrote:
However you need also to add that the \extern primitive allows to
access these computational capabilities with an underlying
scripting language. Here the comparison can be made with HTML/JS.
And the native macro system too pushes one outside the markup system, right?
One has to distinguish between the 'syntax' of a document
(the way a parser should understand it) and its actual 'semantics'.
The _syntax_ of TeXmacs documents is relatively simple:
anyone can write a parser for TeXmacs documents.
The semantics of TeXmacs is more complex,
since you may need to evaluate macros or extern constructs.
The same holds for Html+Javascript.
In the case of TeX/LaTeX, there is no clean distinction between
syntax and semantics, whence the problems for parsing and converting LaTeX.
Finally, for my remark that TeX is the easiest to read "markup" that
I know, it occurred to me that the format of computer algebra
systems is still easier to read; but perhaps it is not comprehensive
enough to be used for typesetting a document, and if you include
more syntactic expressions so that it is, it becomes as difficult to
read as TeX at least. Maybe I will experiment a bit with
Mathematica, which as far as I remember can format mathematical
expressions as well; I need to express all input in linear form of
course otherwise it is easier to read but the comparison is unfair ;-)
This is getting more and more off-topic.