From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.comp.tex.context/4543
Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail
From: S2P development <taco.hoekwater@wkap.nl>
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.tex.context
Subject: Re: Functional MetaPost?
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 10:37:36 +0200
Sender: owner-ntg-context@let.uu.nl
Message-ID: <3ADD5250.6C89FF03@wkap.nl>
References: <20010417163334.M501@cs.ucc.ie>
	<20010417171102.410%67776@mail.talknet.de> <20010417163334.M501@cs.ucc.ie>
	<3.0.6.32.20010418092414.01bc3df0@server-1>
NNTP-Posting-Host: coloc-standby.netfonds.no
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1035395201 26629 80.91.224.250 (23 Oct 2002 17:46:41 GMT)
X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org
NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 17:46:41 +0000 (UTC)
Original-To: ntg-context@ntg.nl
Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.comp.tex.context:4543
X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tex.context:4543

Hans Hagen wrote:
> 
> At 10:44 PM 4/17/01 +0200, Johannes Huesing wrote:
> >On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 04:33:34PM +0100, Marc van Dongen wrote:
> >> Henning Hraban Ramm (hraban@fiee.net) wrote:
> >>
> >> : I just read in the german TeX-D-L about something named
> >> : "Functional MetaPost", written in a never-heard language named
> >> : Haskell. Perhaps someone is interested:
> >>
> >> Haskell is extremely cool. Check it out.
> >
> >This recommendation definitely does not extend to Henning :-)
> >
> >I haven't seriously dealt with Haskell but it looks like it has
> >an extremely steep learning curve.
> 
> A quick look at the paper [describes an alternative for the boxit package]

I'm a bit disappointed by the paper, actually. I was hoping for a
haskell 
reimplementation of metapost, which is certainly doable and quite
probably 
a good idea(tm). 

There is a definate upper limit to the amount of abstraction you can
apply
to an image; statements like

	picture := landscape.pretty;

are not particularly useful. At least partially, this is why the
metafont
language allows you to invent your own idiom. It looks like the author
of
the package did not really understand the mp language *or* felt the need
to do something in Haskell, period. The package described in the paper
is
not so different from other wrappers around mp, and the implementation 
language appears irrelevant except for the fact that it uses Haskell 
syntax/idiom. I've got another wrapper that uses Perl (privately), Hans
has
a wrapper that uses TeX (metafun), etc. etc.

Side note:
The metafont language interpreter allows you to do rather wild things,
and 
I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that you can write an
interpreter 
for functional metapost in traditional metapost ;)

Greetings, Taco