On Thu, Jan 06, 2000 at 08:37:31PM +0100, Asger K. Alstrup Nielsen wrote:
> > Actually, why at the beginning LyX didn't write LaTeX directly but had
> > its own LyX format? I suppose that's because LaTeX is too complicated to
> > parse, right?
>
[lots of erudite discussion snipped]
> The better solution is the current one: With reLyX, you
> are more willing to accept that not everything is readable,
Although not so willing that you refrain from sending in bug reports.
> and also, since Perl is a better text processor than C++,
I thought Perl was a good-for-nothing write-only snail-speed language!
> it's highly likely that reLyX does a better job than a
> C++ parser developed in the same time frame.
Well, my brother's a CS professor. When I was bragging at him about how
reLyX worked so well, as long as you didn't use plain TeX, or interesting
LaTeX commands, or unsupported packages (i.e., all of them), he said, "why
don't you just use the parser in LaTeX, which is guaranteed to understand
LaTeX?" The best answer I could come up with was, "because I've already
spent a year working on reLyx." It's possible that starting from that
parser, you could have developed something better in a year. But who knows?
> There are other reasons as well, including the difficultly
> of implementing a capable LaTeX parser, but we had a very huge
> discussion about exactly this issue a year or two ago, when we
> discussed whether we should move to a format which is a subset
> of LaTeX.
> At that point, the conclusion was that it would be a mistake,
> and I see nothing that changes this conclusion.
In fact, the way I remember it is that there was a huge ongoing discussion,
and the plan was to do it eventually. Then reLyX appeared, and the core
LyXers decided it wasn't worth changing the whole parser since reLyX worked,
albeit not very well at that point. So partly the decision was made due to
circumstance.
-Amir
