[luatex] Hash tokens meaning

[Sensei]

On 5/28/13 5:53pm, luigi scarso wrote:
>
>
>
> On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 3:04 PM, Sensei <senseiwa at gmail.com
> <mailto:senseiwa at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>
>     Pardon me, but I'm used to write code in C, assembly, C++, or
>     whatever other programming language (mainly those three, in that
>     order). TeX is very, very different.
>
> Another option is to download the source of luatex, compile it with the
> --debug switch
> and then run luatex with gdb.
> Probably (not evidently nor obviously)  you need a format: you can
> install a context standalone which has a plain fmt easy to build.
> TeX is a procedural markup  language where everything, even a
> character,  is a procedure (or macro ),
> luatex, pdftex,xetex,etex are interpreters of TeX with some differences
> on the languages accepted,
> but basically they all are Syntax-Directed Interpreters: a big
> switch/case inside a while that dispatches the tokens from the lexer
> to the right subroutines (iirc it's called main_control in
> maincontrol.w, the cweb file).

That's interesting.

> The main difference from others similar languages probably is the fact
> that the user can modify the meaning of the tokens,
> more or less as if  were able to modify the keywords of C --- so  TeX is
> a kind of meta SDI ;
> also it's carefully designed to be platform independent (but as  say
> previously you should see
> http://www.tug.org/texinfohtml/web2c.html#Memory-dumps)
> With  a debugged version of luatex , the plain format from standalone
> and test.tex like
> Hello\bye
> you can see TeX in action running gdb with
> luatex --fmt=luatex-plain.fmt test.tex



Thanks Luigi, the fact that I can modify everything is new (no other 
programming language does that at this level, iirc).

I moved to read the TeX book, maybe that clarifies a lot.


Cheers