On 03/23/2010 05:00 PM, Roan Kattouw wrote:
I suggested a Python port because http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2010#MediaWiki_core lists it as a potential project idea. I was under the impression that people around here did not want to leave texvc in OCaml. Is this wrong?
No, it's right. Conrad is crazy. :P
Having it in a language no one understands is a bad thing and leads to maintenance not happening, so yeah, we definitely want it rewritten in PHP. If the PHP implementation turns out to be too slow to run on WMF, for instance, we could do a C++ port à la wikidiff2 (a C++ port of our ludicrously slow PHP diff implementation).
And here was me thinking that maintenance didn't happen because making changes to security critical sections of the code is dangerous :). The current implementation is just over a thousand lines of exceedingly concise code, while I agree that a re-implementation in PHP is probably sensible, I'll stubbornly maintain that the existing OCaml is more suited to the task. (Oh, and it seems I misread that proposal; I could not imagine a language other than LaTeX being useful for doing maths :p).
While re-implementing the syntax whitelister would not be too hard, LaTeX, with it's wonderfully re-definable syntax is incredibly dangerous. Have fun, and be careful!
Conrad
http://tug.ctan.org/cgi-bin/ctanPackageInformation.py?id=xii