🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2652@trantor.harris-atd.com> chuck@trantor.harris-atd.com (Chuck Musciano) writes:
>     I suppose you could argue "arcane" but not "programming language".  I
>would bet that both troff and TeX are Turing-complete.

Correct.  I was arguing "arcane".  TeX is definitely Turing equivalent
and troff can be forced into it for argument's sake.  Quite amusing to
see things like a "towers of hanoi" solution written in TeX:  it does
not produce a printable document, instead it writes its solutions to
the terminal & log file!

The programmable nature of TeX has an advantage and a disadvantage:
the disadvantage is that it is harder to learn, the advantage is that
if TeX doesn't already do something for you it most likely can be
programmed to do it for you (unless it's the halting problem, of course).

Are any WYSIWYG systems Turing equivalent?

Does everyone even know what we mean by Turing equivalent?  (It means
that it has at least all the functionality of a Turing machine---most
easily proved by emulating a Turing machine in the language in
question).

As for your statement that such systems are, in general, harder to
learn than WYSIWYG systems (sorry, I already deleted the exact quote):

A system like LaTeX is not that hard to teach a secretary, provided
that you confine yourself to producing the types of documents that
LaTeX already has "styles" for.  What is the most difficult in LaTeX
is producing a new style.  For this you need someone who is (a)
proficient in LaTeX and TeX and (b) knowledgeable about what a good
printed document looks like.  But for any decent-sized organization,
replace "LaTeX and TeX" with the document-processing-system-of-your-choice
and this statement is still true!  You want someone like that on staff
anyway.  How easy is it to make a new "form" or "style" in FrameMaker
that will produce *good* looking documents?  Can you easily teach a
secretary how to do that?

What this boils down to is this: the primary goal of a WYSIWYG system
is ease of use and ease of self-instruction; the primary goal of TeX
is producing the best-looking document possible.  The emphases are
different.  But, what we have seen lately from Frame and ArborTeX is
systems that try to attain both goals simultaneously.  I'm ALL for
that!

I'll be quiet now......


		William LeFebvre
		Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
		Northwestern University
		<phil@eecs.nwu.edu>