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Comment by junke | Hacker News Reader

Oh no, Chapter 5 (Understanding the typesetting model) and 6 (Extending Patoline) of the book (https://patoline.org/patobook.pdf) are not yet finished, that's what I wanted to read :-)

Did the author try to reverse engineer TeX? Is there anything that Patoline can do better w.r.t. typesetting, for some definition of "better"?

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No reverse engineering required: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/abcde.html It would be interesting to know at least if it was using the same algorithms.

Well, not "reverse engineering", sorry, but that's the idea: did they use the same algorithms and rewrote them exactly as same in OCaml? did they find anything that could be done better? etc.

What do you mean by "reverse engineering TeX"? Since TeX: The Program [1] is freely available with full source code and complete explanations of the the source code, I don't think one could characterize understanding how TeX works as reverse engineering.

[1] http://wiki.c2.com/?TexTheProgram

Sorry, "reverse engineering" is clearly a bad choice of words. What I meant was that one aspect (and maybe a goal) of rewriting TeX in OCaml is to reorganize the code from a procedural approach to a functional one, while trying to clean up any accidental complexity. That requires to take some distance with the actual code, and is not easy. That's why there are not many successful TeX rewrites (I can't cite any, but I am interested in knowing if some of them exist).

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