[texhax] which TeX?

[Pierre MacKay]

>
> I'm curious.  I couldn't tell looking at the above bakoma website, but,
> are there any TeX systems (commercial or not) that don't rely on the
> usual Knuth WEB/Pascal/Pascal2C TeX engine, but on a complete
> (compatible) rewrite in some more modern language.  I've read about Omega
> and I think another project in Java, but they seem to be in stasis.
>    

I should think that the "compatible" requirement would militate against 
any rewrite that did not start with Pascal.
THe conservatism about the WEB version is part of the promise that the 
TeX engine will continue to produce the same output from output from any 
given input sinsince TeX82 was stabilized (and for the most part, even 
before).  Additions to that engine and its feature---I do mean 
feature---of archival stability really must adhere to the requirement 
that if you call it TeX, it should pass the TRIP test, and I think that 
it would be extraordinarly difficult to do that in a new language.  
Probably not worth the effort.

Pierre MacKay