>> Recently, TeX has been extended with a lua interpreter: luaTeX;
>> this seems to be the future, since complete support for OpenType
>> has been already implemented.
>
> Interesting. But I wonder: apart from backwards compatibility,
> wouldn't it make more sense to reimplement the basic routines of the
> typesetter in the chosen language instead of tacking an interpreter
> onto the typesetting engine to expose internals that were never
> designed to be accessed externally?
Well, TeX syntax is awkward for most computational stuff. It has been
designed with typography in mind. Additionally, there are serious
design flaws (which were not visible or even thinkable at the time
Knuth wrote TeX), making it very hard to support recent font and
encoding development. For example, TeX's hyphenation works on glyphs
instead on characters. This is fine for simple Latin, but if you
start to substitute glyphs according to OpenType, things get hairy.
The implementors seem to be still quite happy about the marriage
between lua and TeX.
Werner
