[tex-live] Fortran and Pascal sources

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Tue Oct 5 12:34:46 CEST 2010


On 5 October 2010 Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:

 > Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
 > > On 4 October 2010 Karl Berry wrote:
 > >
 > >   >  How about "simply" rewriting the Fortran program in C :)?
 > >
 > > Seriously, *if* someone is willing and has the time to port it to
 > > another language, then IMO texlua is by far the best choice.
 > 
 > See the earlier reply, Reinhard : the program is an ongoing
 > work-in-progress, so any port could only freeze it at some
 > arbitrary point in its evolution.

Sure, but I only said that texlua is a better choice than C.  Given
that someone translates it manually to another language, it makes
sense to maintain the new code instead of the Fortran stuff.  However,
I think that the author is using Fortran because he's familiar with
it.  If one wants to convince a Fortran programmer to learn another
language, Lua is a better choice than C because it's much easier to
learn.

On the other hand, if the author continues maintaining the Fortran
code, the only way to get it into TL build system seems to convert it
to C automatically, but the problems of this approach had been
discussed already.

Though I doubt that anybody has enough time anyway, I wanted to
mention the advantages of texlua, at least.  Karl proposed C because
it's the only language supported by the TeX Live build system.  But
texlua scripts don't need the build system at all.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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