mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[sylvain <address@hidden>]

Hi,

Your project is great. I apologise for not having discovered it before. 

One of the fun of computing is that people can find very technically
different solutions to the same problem. This is yet another example.

We both wanted to be able to do the same: write program code in
Texmacs. 

You seem to be very knowledgeable about literate programming à la
Knuth. I am more used to Integrated Development Environment like
Eclipse, that I love because of the productivity it allows.

So, you asked yourself the question: how can I put markups in a Texmacs
document so that my external program can extract it? User inserts code
fragment in an arbitrary order and runs "make", which calls an external
tool, that extracts the code, make compiles it. And your project does
exactly that.

I asked rather the question: how can I get Texmacs to extract the code,
compile it and insert the result so that I can have fast round-trip? 

texmacs-fedit leverages the plug-in infrastructure to do exactly that. 

The project is structured so that one can add a specialized plug-in for
a dedicated language. It is possible to parse the output of the compiler
to, for example, highlight the location of an error.

Another problem I wanted to try to solve is to explore the possibility
to convert Texmacs advanced typesetting into one-lined ASCII concrete
syntax understood by a compiler. I believe the one-dimensional one-line
input from the good old 70's is holding us back. Not when you program in
traditional languages, but when you want to program in modern languages
like ATS, whose text source, when forced to be one-dimensional, become
rapidly unreadable. Other languages I can think of that would benefit of
that are Agda and Haskell.
(The trouble is, I am stuck with a bug in my version of Texmacs
(1.0.7.3, Ubuntu) and didn't made much progress on this front.)

I personally hate duplication of effort. If it was clear-cut that your
project has the best approach to reach these goals, I would drop fedit
down right-away. But I am not convinced of that. Rather I think that
both answer to different use-cases and are valuable. In that sense we
didn't wasted our time, neither you nor me.

Ideally, we would merge both projects, but I don't see for now how it
could be done, since they have taken radically different technical ways.
If you have an idea, let me know.

Greetings,
Sylvain