Re: lout equations, general commentary.

[Glauber Ribeiro]

David,

i like to think of the relationship between TeX and Lout as similar to that of 
assembly language and a 3rd generation programming language such as Pascal.

Lout tends to be more verbose, but it's a lot easier to understand. TeX is 
terse and gives you machine-language power to do anything.
LaTeX is just plain weird! :-) :-) :-)


glauber
---
Glauber Ribeiro
address@hidden
"Wherever you go, that's where you are."


On Fri, 13 Aug 1999 11:00:21   David Feuer wrote:
>I have just started looking at lout, which seems to have some
>nice features, but it seems to me that its syntax is extremely
>verbose, its mathematics unstructured, and its command namespace
>far too flat.
>       It seems to take quite a bit of typing to get even a simple
>equation.  One of the great advantages of TeX is that even
>complex equations can be created without slowing the typist too
>much.  Lout's equations don't seem so friendly.  The added
>verbosity is quite acceptible in a high-level math language like
>ML, in which the equation must include abstract meaning as well
>as formatting, but seems excessive in a pure formatting
>language.  I also think that lout's (like TeX's) equation
>language is not nearly structured enough.  It does not seem to
>care about the intrinsic grouping of the equation, ending up with
>an equation that looks good on paper, but is not very meaningful
>internally.  While I could easily be mistaken, it does not seem
>that the logical components of an equation are boxed together.
>       There seem to be many top-level macros for doing similar
>things.  For instance, there is a separate macro for each
>paragraph style, though fortunately they are all based on a
>parameterized primitive.  I think it would be much nicer if the
>command namespace were partitioned.  For instance,
>parstyle.ragged
>parstyle.normal
>and so on.
>
>       I really like lout's "objects".  They are far, far better than
>TeX boxes.  I also like the diagramming tools, which seem to be
>one of its stronger features.  The table support also looks
>really good.  TeX alignments are rather limited.  I suppose that
>each formatting system will have certain strengths, depending on
>the needs of the author.
>
>-- 
>This message has been brought to you by the letter alpha and the
>number pi.
>
>David Feuer
>address@hidden
>address@hidden
>Open Source: Think locally; act globally.
>Check out humbolt.geo.uu.nl/lists
>
>


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