[Dev-luatex] REQ: Please tell comp.text.tex why LuaTeX chose embed rather than extend.

[Khaled Hosny]

On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 03:03:01PM +0100, Jonathan Fine wrote:
>> the reasons for choosing lua are (1) we like it, (2) it's small and  
>> stable, (3) it does not add updating, huge libraries and depencies mess 
>> to tex distributions, (4) it's fast, (5) it's made for this purpose
>
> Ah, you may have misunderstood me.  Perhaps I was not clear enough.  My  
> question is not why did you choose Lua, but why did you choose to embed  
> rather than to extend.

I, personally, don't see the point of such question; it is clear that
LuaTeX team, to whom I've no affiliation, are trying to extend and
improve TeX and for some reasons they found extending it with a
scripting language is nice idea and went with it. I fail to understand
why they would be extending Lua by a typesetting engine when they are
actually interested in the engine not Lua. Sure having TeX as a service
is a neat idea and would make TeX available to many uses that is hard to
be done now, but I can clearly see that this never have been one of the
stated goals of LuaTeX.

Regards,
 Khaled


-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer
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