Re:Donald Knuth was framed
by kragen on Friday February 28, 2020 @10:23PM
(#22448560)
Thank you!
It's probably worth pointing out that nobody uses TeX bare without a LaTeX-like macro library. Knuth wrote his books with a macro library confusingly called "plain TeX", which ships with the TeX language interpreter. (That interpreter was the subject of this thread.) LaTeX relies on the plain TeX library, just as, for example, GLib relies on the C standard library. The third alternative popular TeX macro library for document formatting, other than plain TeX and LaTeX, is a thing called ConTeXt. It seems to me that ConTeXt is less popular than LaTeX, but more popular than plain TeX.
But of course to invoke any of these you have to write code in TeX, just as to invoke Rails you have to write code in Ruby, or to invoke Numpy you have to write code in Python.
As far as reimplementations, I think the only reimplementations were done at Stanford in the late 1970s as Knuth and his students wrote a series of prototypes, culminating in the TeX language we know today in 1983.
It's probably worth pointing out that nobody uses TeX bare without a LaTeX-like macro library. Knuth wrote his books with a macro library confusingly called "plain TeX", which ships with the TeX language interpreter. (That interpreter was the subject of this thread.) LaTeX relies on the plain TeX library, just as, for example, GLib relies on the C standard library. The third alternative popular TeX macro library for document formatting, other than plain TeX and LaTeX, is a thing called ConTeXt. It seems to me that ConTeXt is less popular than LaTeX, but more popular than plain TeX.
But of course to invoke any of these you have to write code in TeX, just as to invoke Rails you have to write code in Ruby, or to invoke Numpy you have to write code in Python.
As far as reimplementations, I think the only reimplementations were done at Stanford in the late 1970s as Knuth and his students wrote a series of prototypes, culminating in the TeX language we know today in 1983.