@JosephWright I mean as in "not particularly easy to break down into smaller ideas"

Thinking about it...

Consider C for example, it doesn't have built in for copying array etc.

but you can copy elements one by one

On the other hand, it's absolutely nontrivial to figure out how to e.g. check if the first one in a token list is a space in TeX

Talk about "why is TeX hard"

By the way @Skillmon Just type ​``a`b``​ to render a`b, no need to double backtick

Markdown can be weird sometimes

weirder than TeX

@user202729 Well perhaps but really one needs a use case - we have other 'cool' things that we've ruled out as there is nothing obvious to do with them

The Great Tikzlings Christmas Extravaganza 2021: vimeo.com/660399886

@PauloCereda ohh :)

@samcarter ooh

@PauloCereda ho ho ho

@PauloCereda Where is the T?

@CarLaTeX oopsie

@JosephWright could you edit my message, please? Apparently I am good at typos. :)

@PauloCereda Done

@JosephWright thanks :)

@DavidCarlisle gist.github.com/zr-tex8r/f8ef43532681cc3039da1f2dc5e563e6

@JosephWright I think I missed the point: In what context exactly are the problems with multiple consecutive spaces?

@UlrichDiez I don't recall exactlt: we had some code 10+ years ago for a string-like comparison without \pdfstrcmp, but it didn't work with some cases of spaces

@JosephWright So it is about comparing two sets of tokens where it is ensured that both sets consist only of explicit character-tokens; those with character code 32 being of category 10(space); those with character-code differing from 32 being of category 12(other)?

If that describes the problem correctly, I can provide an expandable loop which with each argument checks for a leading explicit-space-token and if present in both arguments removes it via delimited arguments, and if not present extracts the first token from the arguments and compares them via \if.

@barbarabeeton twitter.com/Berlin_Type/status/1475451421717790721

@JosephWright This is my expandable string-comparison-routine:

Pasting the routine removed code-indentation and consecutive spaces in the \verb*|...|-commands. Too bad that the \verb*|...|-commands now don't show spaces correctly.

Another attempt where `\verb|...|-commands are displayed correctly:

Too early: Again pasting the routine removed code-indentation and consecutive spaces in the \verb*|...|-commands. Too bad that the \verb*|...|-commands now still don't show spaces correctly.

@PauloCereda -- Ausgezeichnet!

@barbarabeeton hallo, ich bin ein Ente. :)

@PauloCereda -- Ein Erpel.

@barbarabeeton oopsie

@barbarabeeton German is very difficult. :)

I might need help from @DavidCarlisle :)

@PauloCereda -- Wirklich.

@barbarabeeton ooh

@PauloCereda die Ente = the duck / der Erpel = der Enterich = the drake; eine Ente = a duck / ein Erpel = ein Enterich = a drake; zwei Enten= two ducks / zwei Erpel = zwei Enteriche = two drakes; drei Enten = three ducks / drei Erpel = drei Enteriche = three drakes -> now there are enough ducks and drakes for starting a nice quak-party. :-)

@UlrichDiez ooh this is good teaching method. :) Thanks! <3

@PauloCereda Thank you. "Ente"/"Enterich"/"Erpel" and "Küken" are basic vocabulary that one can not do without :-)

@UlrichDiez Definitely!

@UlrichDiez I had to cancel my trip to Germany in 2019 due to COVID, but I was worried with language barriers. I know just a few sentences and words. I knew Wasser, Bier and Kuchen, so I probably wouldn't die of starvation in the first days of my adventure. :) Hallo, ich heiße Paulo und ich bin ein Erpel. Sprechen Sie Englisch? Prost!

ooh and I can sing the Schnappi song

The kleine krokodil

@UlrichDiez ooh we have lots of tapirs and capys around!

@PauloCereda I envy you! capy = capybara?

@UlrichDiez Yep! :) My alma mater had a lot of capybaras in the Olympic lane: youtube.com/watch?v=Q2IvkAB_UKI

@barbarabeeton ^^ :)

USP's Olympic lane and a highway. :) These capys live in the heart of the city of São Paulo! Quite amusing!

About let-hack to process spaces, brace hack and everything

Probably won't complain, "TeX isn't designed to be programmed in"

About unreadable code, expl3 did make it much better (within the limitation of TeX the engine)

@UlrichDiez (and @PauloCereda) -- I had the opportunity to attend an illustrated lecture by Gerald Durrell about his Jersey Wildlife Conservation Trust. He drew cartoons while he was talking. My favorite drawing was of a capybara slurping up a strand of spaghetti. They weren't sure what capybaras ate, so they tried a lot of things, and found that the creature really liked spaghetti! Read his books -- they're really delightful. Someday I hope to be able to visit the Jersey Zoo.

@user202729 Well, it used to be ` to create a single backtick inside backticks (that is backslash + backtick inside backticks)

Used to be what? I can't read source (actually I can but don't remember the URL)

Also HTML doesn't work in chat or comment

There's 4-space indent for literal, but that's it)

Markdown does have poor specification

And I guess nowadays you need to include ZWS hack to include backtick inside backtick around the border, or space around the border.

Would be nice to have "list of things that cannot be done expandably in TeX", but definitely too broad

(and not provable)

@barbarabeeton ooh!

Inside this chat you can use backslash followed by tick to produce a single tick inside of code formatted stuff (so inside of ticks).

@user202729 and inconsistent

@user202729 Correct, and that's the biggest problem. In one place this works in others completely different stuff.

There's We're switching to CommonMark - Meta Stack Exchange for now

@user202729 but thanks for pointing out, I corrected this in my answer.

@Skillmon /duck hug

@PauloCereda Merry Christmas (retroactively)

@Skillmon Merry Christmas Mr. Rabbit :)

@PauloCereda /rabbit nibble

Maybe I should write some Lua library to handle token list.

(and also figure out how to speed LuaTeX up, if possible)

People says font data can't be dumped, but I guess fork() may work. Not that familiar with UNIX and C however

Not that I particularly need to do complex programming in TeX for now. Maybe I can rewrite my old macros in Lua

Do you look up expl3's interface.pdf every time you write a single line of code in expl3?

I still find myself have to do that

@user202729 much is in my brain, but every now and then I lose an s in a name or something like that and have to look it up just to be sure.

@user202729 Before I start reinventing the wheel, did anyone already do something similar?

People still mostly write TeX macros in TeX right?

Even with expl3 I still find it somewhat annoying

@user202729 well, if it should be portable there is not much you can do :) I personally use pdfTeX for everything, except if there is something which is hindering its usage (memory hungry plots for instance), so I code my macros to run in pdfTeX...

"Why not switch to LuaTeX"

Performance?

@samcarter @UlrikeFischer @CarLaTeX 54 views so far!

And:

ooh

WE ARE FAMOUS

@PauloCereda Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@barbarabeeton I'd like to visit the Jersey Zoo too. What did you think of Gerald Durrell? Read his books too. Some of them, anyway.

I once tried to persuade some people to go there as part of a vacation. I failed.

Apparently zoos aren't interesting. Or not interesting enough.

@FaheemMitha -- He was a quite delightful speaker and a fluent writer. (So was his brother Lawrence, author of the "Alexandria Quartet.) Obviously, found the opportunity to hear him speak attractive, and was quite pleased at the event. I don't believe zoos should be for entertainment only; they have, however, been instrumental for reviving a number of species and, when possible, restoring them to their native habitats, which is admirable. (But polar bears, I fear, are doomed.)

@barbarabeeton ooh giraffes

@samcarter we need a TikZgiraffe please <3

@barbarabeeton Yes, I'm aware that the Jersey Zoo is primarily for the purpose of conservation. You forgot to end your last sentence, BTW.

Maybe we might to increase the page geometry

@barbarabeeton According to the biography I read (Botting) he wasn't especially keen on people. But his books betray no trace of that.

@PauloCereda ohh! I think this is only a lower limit of views. When I watched it earlier the counter did not increase and was still zero when I visited the site again later. Maybe because I'm not logged in?

@barbarabeeton I think we're all doomed. But ssh - don't tell anyone.

@PauloCereda ohh :)

@FaheemMitha -- My laptop is misbehaving. It has now twice entirely wiped out what I was typing. Causing an item to be released prematurely is relatively minor.

@barbarabeeton Sorry to hear that. Computers can be annoying.

@samcarter not sure, maybe it's because twitter might embed the player and it doesn't count, and the web page does not update frequently. We will see. I have very limited stats, as Vimeo charges for them. :)

@FaheemMitha -- I'll try to keep that quiet. But from everything I see, the environment is in a feedback loop which is getting more and more difficult to interrupt.

@barbarabeeton ooh polar bears catch fish with their bear hands. :)

@barbarabeeton A very bad and dangerous feedback loop.

I'm a few hundred meters away from the Arabian Sea here. I've been reading articles saying we're going to be underwater within 10 years (2030).

@PauloCereda -- They're also very fond of seals. But not, as some people might mistakenly believe, penguins.

I've no idea what science that is based on, if anything.

@PauloCereda yeah, that might be it. Anyway, nice to see that that people watch it :)

@barbarabeeton ooh :) Apparently, penguins don't have a... a seal of approval. :)

I am gonna shut up now. :)

@PauloCereda -- No. Like you, penguins on this earth live "upside down". There are some bird species that migrate from one pole to the other, but penguins are not among them.

@barbarabeeton Oopsie. :)

@FaheemMitha -- It would be "safer" for you if you lived a few hundred meters above the Arabian Sea. (By 2030 or so, the local hurricane barrier that keeps water from inundating downtown Providence will no longer be high enough to withstand a severe storm at high tide in Narragansett Bay.)

Maybe penguins avoid going to Great Britain because they are afraid of Wales.

@barbarabeeton Sadly, I don't live a few hundred meters above the Arabian sea.

I don't exactly know, but I suspect we're pretty much at sea level here.

I suppose there are instruments that would tell me.

@barbarabeeton I think I must have first read "My Family and Other Animals" as a small child. I can't even remember reading it for the first time.

@barbarabeeton You met Lawrence Durrell too?

@FaheemMitha -- A good geologic map should be able to indicate altitude. Maybe you can find one. Around here, they're redrawing the maps to show the changing extent of flood plains, for insurance purposes.

@barbarabeeton I probably could find out, sure.

And I probably should. In the spirit of knowing the bad news.

@FaheemMitha -- No, I've only read some of his writing. Both brothers are quite facile with applying the English language.

@barbarabeeton I see. I've never read of Lawrence Durrell's books. Maybe an extract or two, somewhere.

I'm not very familiar with the issues, but I think the Durrells have done very important conservation work.

@FaheemMitha -- Lawrence wrote fiction, Gerald (mostly) nonfiction.

@barbarabeeton Yes, I'm aware. The Alexandria Quartet, for example.

@PauloCereda -- Not near you, but the floods are terrible! I hope that help is swift and attentive.

Managed to book my booster for tomorrow! Yay!

@yo' Good for you!

@yo' -- Hooray! Don't miss it!

Hi all, this crossed my social media time line. journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/… Did you see this? I admit, I did not read it all, but found it a bad attack against LaTeX.

@Gudrun -- The design of this experiment was bogus: reproduce an existing article. This makes "irrelevant" (impossible) the use of a document class, which is one of the greatest strengths of LaTeX. Inclusion of a table is also biased against LaTeX, although not as egregiously. I believe there was discussion of this on this forum at the time (2014).

@Bar

@barbarabeeton Sorry, my answer disappeared. Thank you for your reply. I apologise, I did not see the publication date. Sorry about it. Re: reproducing a text: I would still try to use an article class and start. I will happily continue with LaTeX.

Sorry that I bothered you with this.

@Gudrun -- Oh, no problem. A lot of people were "gaslighted" by this at the time, and it's still easily accessible online, without (I believe) any credible commentary attached. I admit being biased pro (La)TeX, but understand that different goals have different needs. The bias in that article is hidden; I can't say it's intentional or simply uninformed, but would have liked to see more careful analysis in that context.

@yo' -- The news from New York City is not good. It looks like you timed your visit optimally.

@Gudrun the funny thing is that there needed to be a corrected version of that article to fix some layout errors... :) See: journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/… (link is also on the page you linked to)

@Skillmon Upps, did not see it either. I checked it, but I could not see the exact changes for the correction. But it does not matter really. Probably, this article was a waste of time.

@Gudrun no, no. I cite: "[...] we empirically compared the usability of LateX and Word under highly realistic working conditions."

Now, I see it, "This article was republished on March 30, 2015, to correct the sizing and placement of the figures; none of the article content was changed. The publisher apologizes for the original layout errors." That part scrolle up when I clicked on supporting info.

@Gudrun now we have to guess whether it was prepared using Word or LaTeX...

Indeed. I think this is not disclosed.

@barbarabeeton well, that's pure luck that we managed to get all the trips at the very right time and that we didn't catch anything there. Also the booster is sort-of luck: you have to choose the vaccination site when you register and some of them are much faster in opening the actual shot slots.

@Gudrun and honestly, I'm really wondering what kind of LaTeX users were considered as "experts". For fun I just recreated the first example: Typing the text (with semantic markup) took me less than 10 minutes, now I got 20 minutes left to get the correct formatting. That might as well be enough to write a primitive document class that recreates this one page... :)

@Skillmon I agree. I wondered it myself. :D I thought they had asked somebody from here maybe, but probably that wasn't the case. I think the mentioned the number of hours. " Participants were classified as “novices” if they had less than 500 hours of experience with the respective program and “experts” if they had more than 1000 hours of experience with the respective program."

Well done to you!

@Skillmon is for you example one fig 1?

@Gudrun yes, the "just text" one.

At least it took you only 10min to copy the text.

@Gudrun Well, I didn't proof read or anything, but usually I type relatively error free, and I did pay attention to type error-free, so am quite confident that I copied all the old German orthography "correctly" :)

I meant it more in a way, puh, only 10min, and not more of your lifetime wasted on this strange exercise.

@Gudrun I was waiting for something ... :)

Fair enough :-)

Thank you for the discussion. Good night!