% mmfuture.tex % (c) 1992 Jeroen Hellingman % Last edit: 09-DEC-1992 \beginsection On the future of \TeX Working on Malayalam-\TeX, I met with more and more limitations of \TeX, which needed ad-hoc solutions, that will not win an elegance price. It made me dream of a future \TeX-like system, that would incorporate all scripts in a more elegant way. Several people have made suggestions on the future of \TeX, but most of them, again, focussed on the Western languages. I think a transistion to the emerging 16-bit Unicode (ISO 10646) standard will be the most natural next step. \TeX\ was orignally designed for two `scripts', English and Mathematics, and it does a very good job of typesetting both of them, but one gets in problems when one tries to typeset another script with it, for example Malayalam, or one of the various other scripts in use for writing the spoken languages of the world, or to name the most difficult of all, typesetting music. A future-\TeX\ should be build up in some modular manner, so that other scripts can be added more easily. Apart from being a typesetting system, \TeX\ is a fullfledged programming language, but a horrible ackward one. As Frank Mittelbach, suggested, it would be nice to replace it with a more conventional one, although his suggestion to use lisp fills me with new horrors. I think a more modern functional language like miranda would be a much candidate. A functional language with some very basic functions needed for typesetting would be a good kernel in my eyes. All logic needed for typesetting a script could then be coded in the language itself, instead of being hardwired into the system. Adding a new script would then be as easy as designing a font for the script (A difficult enough task in itself) and writing the logic for composing the script from a character-stream, which then could be loaded into the system. An anochronism that has annoyed me more and more when I started making several variants and sizes of my font is the use of bitmaps, with took up more and more space on my harddisk. I would propose to join the powers of \TeX\ and \MF into one program, that use the speak the same language, so that one can have direct access to character-programs, to create the letter in the size and style wanted at the a certain moment. \bye