Is there a BNF grammar of the TeX language? (2010)

FTFY. If you learn TeX from Knuth’s TeX book, along with the typographical concepts it works with, the error messages generated by documents written in raw TeX are understandable.

LaTeX on the other hand is what the metaprogramming-heavy Boost/STL libraries are to C or C++. Abandon all hope.

That said, even with these restrictions, writing a good lexer/parser of a LaTeX-like syntax is still a challenge (and made all the slower by the needs to earn money, spend time with my kids and have other joys in life).

You hit the nail on the head. Brilliant design of the typesetting system, not an ergonomic language.

I think over the next few years Scroll (https://scroll.pub/) will become the language all academics use to publish papers.(Or another markdown like alternative, but ours will be _very_, _very_ good)

You are always in an ergonomic, simple, fun, forgiving high level language (Scroll), but then you can dip down into TeX whenever you want for its beautiful 2D math rendering (thanks to KaTeX library).

We don't have great automatic whole document PDF generation yet (you still have to manually save as PDF from your web browser), but we will get there.

If anyone really wants this please shoot me an email--fun to get more passionate beta users that can help us steer priorities and build something free and great for paper writers all across the globe.

The language itself is horrible and the skill floor is too high but the Turing completeness enables a ton of wacky features that would never be allowed in something like Mathematica.

Still, multiple parsers and great tooling exist for C++, and the error messages have gotten much better in recent years. This is probably because companies needed them for different reasons, and they have the resources to build alternatives.

A friend, although he is a good mathematician, kept criticizing TeX, so I explained one view of it: TeX was not intended to be some new big steps forward in interactive user interface, to replace Microsoft's Word, HTML or Mathematica, or for making images or movies. Instead, TeX was, first, for something he knew well -- the journal of the AMS (American Mathematical Society). For doing the word processing for the AMS, TeX was a nice step forward from what went before.

TeX seems fine to me, just the way it is. Started with Knuth's book and also got his file of TeX source his book. The book is easier to read, but with my favorite text editor KEDIT sometimes the file is easier to search.

Also with the TeX software have the Windows program to display the formatted output on a screen and the program to write the output to a PDF file. Both work fine.

It appears that Knuth made commendable efforts to get any bugs out of TeX.

Wrote some macros for TeX: The main collection has, just checked, 86 macros. Also have macros for some special purposes, e.g., foils, inserting images, verbatim, business cards, etc.

Use TeX for business letters; used TeX for the last paper I published: The paper had a lot of tricky math notation, and TeX handled that well. The journal seemed quite pleased to get the TeX input with my macros; then they were able to format the paper right away.

When rusty with TeX, my old papers, letters, etc. and macro collections get me productive again quickly.

Since I like TeX so much and since the philosophy of LaTeX seems different, never used LaTeX.

Knuth's book shows that it's possible to write long documents with TeX.

The above sentence can be a Forth program. This? Another Forth program.

What does my post do? Run it to find out!

> OK