On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 02:45:44AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
On lun, 2002-12-30 at 23:23, Toby Bartels wrote:
Why we shouldn't install texvc now and then fix it later (assuming that the essay is persuasive on other points). Basically, the reason is that supporting LaTeX directly (as Axel and I want) won't be backwards compatible with current texvc; fixing it later will break some things.
Is there anything that couldn't be fixed by a script (such as texvc itself modified to spit out the preferred LaTeX forms) which would hunt down and fix articles with problem math?
texvc is very automatic and also very fast. By very little code it can easily find things that break after upgrade - you can just check if old version accepts something while new doesn't and what is it.
So far I have used it for finding which symbols look different with AMS and without, and for lot of texvc testing.
Also texvc includes script that exports anything to pure TeX (which is also available on CGI), so if you wanted to take math from Wikipedia and do something with it you still can. (texvc produces some redundant {}s now in its TeX output, is it serious problem ?)
If someone really wants to try blacklist way, texvc can be easily modified to support it. Last line of texutil.ml says: | s -> raise (Illegal_tex_function s)
What means: everything else is illegal
It should be modified to: | "\foo" as s -> raise (Illegal_tex_function s) | "\bar" as s -> raise (Illegal_tex_function s) | s -> LITERAL (TEX_ONLY (s ^ " "))
What means: everything else is legal tex-only literal
where foo bar etc. are all banned functions. Those on current whitelist may be left to support HTML rendering etc.
But I don't think blacklist is any better as: * there may be dangerous undocumented functions * new functions may appear in new versions of TeX modules * adding more supported functions to texvc is very easy if they aren't too magical like \big. In particular adding support for tex-only symbols is trivial.