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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

Click specification: "We're currently working on parsing the TeX sources of the specification to generate a more modern version of the CLHS.

This might take a while."

Yeah, that's probably not the message you want to send after all the virtues (e.g. speed) listed on the first page.

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Why? They're just being honest about it. It's a large spec and it surely isn't that easy to convert it to a more modern format.

Put up a pdf (if you have TeX you can get a pdf), but don't make some technical argument that makes you sound slow. This is marketing not a technical talk.

The CLHS[1] they mentioned has been available online for ages. What they're talking about is making a more modern site. Generating a PDF from the spec wouldn't get them any closer to that goal.

[1]: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index...

Then don't put a specification link on the home page and wait until it is done. The text is non-helpful to marketing the language particularly when books are actually available and linkable that can be read now.

IIRC the legal situation of the hyperspec is a bit weird and converting to other formats could be problematic. (Perhaps someone else may be more precise)

The HyperSpec is under LispWorks' copyright. The official ANSI document is copyrighted. The TeX sources of the spec, however, are fair game.

It's an extremely large language, with most of the things that are normally availible as libraries, defined as part of the language itself. So of course the conversion is going to take a while, especially if the input data isn't very well formatted.

I don't really see how difficulty porting document sets to a nicer format translates into "This language isn't/doesn't foo", since that's more human error than the fault of the language itself.

It's a giant collection of TeX files from 1994. It's not easily converted into a proper, parseable format.

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