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Texmacs therefore symbol4/18/2023 You're looking at LaTeX from a programming point of view and claim, that compared to other programming languages it is hard to use. Similarly If you have " \makeatletter all over the place", you should ask why you have that, that is a hook to access code that the author has intentionally made hard to access from a document, so it it is not typical use it is inline modification of the code of the system, if such modifications are complicated, so be it. ) sprinkled throughout all but the simplest macros Macro hell: tangled webs of junk (\relax, \csname, \let, \patchcmd, Many users use latex quite happily for decades without using any of these It's definitely true that the tex programming required to make a latex2e class is more intricate and less documented than would be ideal, which is something the latex3 project is trying to address, but that has little effect on most users of latex who can simply produce a document using a supplied class. It's different but not necessarily more complicated, but either are considerably more complicated than simply using the system to produce a document. Means that you should be comparing programming functionality in Tex to (say) modifying the C sources of OpenOffice. The reference in your question to standard programming concepts such as numeric types, subroutines etc. Now because latex is open source people modify it in all kinds of ways but the fact that it can be complicated to modify is rather different from saying that it is complicated to use. So once you are used to the \begin/ \end environment concept (which is surely no harder than HTML's / element concept) a latex source file is pretty much self-documenting. Instead, a patchwork of different types of counters and registers, each of which have to be manipulated in their own special way (sometimes 2\mynum, sometimes 2*\mynum, sometimes \multiply by 2, sometimes \addtolength No straightforward types (int, bool, float) with the ordinary manipulation functions.Nonlocal error messages which can be difficult to fix.The ridiculous \makeatletter and \makeatother all over the place.Macro hell: tangled webs of junk ( \relax, \csname, \let, \patchcmd, \expandafter.As I compare LaTeX to these other languages, the following question often comes into my mind:ĭespite my considerable experience with LaTeX, I still regularly encounter non-obvious behaviour and strange error messages, and there are many parts of the language that seem arcane and obtuse. I also do a lot of ordinary computer programming, in traditional languages like C and Visual Basic. I have been using LaTeX professionally almost every day for almost 10 years, so I think I can say that, by now, I more or less know what I'm doing.
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