David Kastrup wrote:
>
> Well, I don't want to sound dismissive either.  I read TeX, the
> Program, quite thoroughly, and I contributed the last iteration of
> pdfsync.sty because it broke too many of my tools and packages.

:))) Well David, that's a little dismissive, but you're one of the
5-or-so ubermasters of TeX and I must just take it. Sorry.
In 2003 people were constantly complaining that they missed
TeXtures so much and how it was wonderful with synchro etc etc.
I started to think a little and came up with this idea.
Tried to convince a couple of TeX gurus, no answer from them,
so I cooked up a quick and dirty style file that sort of worked,
just to entice someone better than me to do something better.
(I'm no coder, just a  mathematician! :)
Sorry that your contribution was kind of extorted, though...


> In a similar vein, ports of TeX tend to be just TeX, nothing else,
> and/or not useful.  And in particular, not pretty, and that means that
> nobody bothers working with the results.

That's a clear answer: porting TeX is not remotely trivial,
and just the wrong thing to do. I was more thinking
of porting selected pieces of TeX, but probably the tangle
(or the web) is too tight.


> At the current point of time there are two projects that are somewhat
> interesting in that regard: ExTeX (Java again, TeX compatible) and Ant
> (OCaml currently, TeX inspired, can work with LaTeX files to some
> degree IIRC).

Why Java again? maybe because at the time ruby or python
were not so well accepted?
Thank you for the pointer to Ant, I'll take a look at it.

Piero