[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[maxwell]

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On Mon, 4 Oct 2010 06:22:13 -0700 (PDT), Apostolos Syropoulos
<asyropoulos at yahoo.com> wrote:
[not sure who is being quoted here:]
>>     TeX was developed as a  subset of SGML 
> TeX as a programming language is a derivative of LISP 

I'm puzzled here.  Re the '>>' line: AFAIK, TeX was developed before SGML
existed; XML is derived from SGML (not sure it's strictly a subset), maybe
that's '>>' meant to write.  

As for the '>' line, the first version of TeX was implemented in SAIL,
which was an Algol-like programming language. The current version is
written in WEB, which is a Pascal-based system + documentation; it is often
converted to C for compilation.  And TeX itself doesn't look anything like
LISP to me, but maybe I'm missing s.t.?  (Like a CAR and a CDR and...)

Can someone enlighten me/us here?

   Mike Maxwell