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From: sb463ba@l1-hrz.uni-duisburg.de (Georg Bauhaus)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Problem trying to implement generics.
Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 15:09:22 +0000 (UTC)
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Robert A Duff (bobduff@world.std.com) wrote:

: It amazes me that Knuth, who is orders of magnitude smarter than me, can
: design such an awful language.  Writing TeX is like writing an
: assembly-language program to generate a document.  Except TeX is more
: error-prone than most assembly languages.  LaTeX is like programming in
: a *macro* assembly language, which has some advantages, but causes all
: error messages to be totally incomprehensible.

The answer to this is, according to some recent publication of his,
is that TeX was to be a _backend_ much in the sense of macro assembly.
He writes that Steele urged him to add more "control structures".

If you are interested in a more Algol-like formatting language
(that uses TeX's paragraph breaking and more), Lout might be a choice.
It has a component, prg2lout, for include source code in documents,
with support for C, Eiffel, Python, and Perl; I've fiddled with adding
Ada support, and this has been fairly easy.  You can refer to
Ada code in comments by quoting it.

ftp://ftp.cs.usyd.edu.au/jeff/lout/
http://snark.ptc.spbu.ru/~uwe/lout/


Georg