mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Salman Khilji <address@hidden>]

I got tired of looking and trying to understand the TeXmacs source code for a 
few days and getting nowhere.  I have sufficient C++ experience with Qt and 
MFC based applications and also with looking at other people's source code 
and making atleast some sense from it (for example, ddd and gdb, kdvi, 
kghostview etc).  

I am sorry to say, but after getting in such a bad mood of a failure to 
understand TeXmacs, I must say that (at least in my opinion) the TeXmacs 
source code sucks.  What all that "abstract_struct" crap? Sounds like some 
sort of useless and confusing way to do some reference counting.  Why derived 
everything from all these classes and make everything dependent on each 
other?  And stuff like:

typedef int SI; 

does nothing but confuse the reader.  I always hated MicroCrap for using 
LPCTSTR as a typedef for const char*.

All those CONCRETE like macros defined in basics.hh is also very confusing 
and 
obscured.  What what in the world is tree.hh?? a binary tree? whatever the 
hell kinda tree it is, I cannot make any sense of it.  There is only a one 
liner documentation at the top of each hh file.  Thats not good enough to 
assume that someone out there would also get interested in TeXmacs and 
contribute towards it.

one of the things that I do when I am trying to understand something is step 
thru the debugger looking at data structure.  gdb is TOTALLY worthless as you 
have to look deep inside the classes and manually type in lots of key strokes 
jsut ot look at what a "string" really is.

looking at a Qt based application, I can make a very good sense of how 
everything is put together.  The widget framework that TeXmacs uses is 
nowhere even close to being documented like the way Qt is.

If TeXmacs was written with Qt, I'd be thinking about taking over a piece of 
it and contributing something towards it.  But with the current way, I am a 
complete failure at it.

What kind of architectural changes are planned at this moment?  What is 
TeXmacs headed?  

Salman