GNU Texinfo

[Nicholas Clark]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 02:27:19PM +0000, Gareth Harper wrote:
> I thought it was quite interesting that it's been rewritten in perl
> (and they're advertising it).
> 
> http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/02/17/2126208/gnu-texinfo-50-released
> 
> Although the normal unreadable perl comments surface seconds into the
> discussion.

What? Some people hate Perl more than they hate info pages? I would never
have believed it :-)

Two interesting comments I spotted:

    What I find interesting about this Perl rewrite is that Guile,
    ostensibly the official scripting language of GNU, has had excellent
    structured texinfo support for years now. It uses stexi which has the
    same structure as sxml, so you gain access to all of the really great
    Scheme XML processing tools, including SXSLT which is basically ideal
    for spitting out arbitrary formats.

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3469697&cid=42932335

and

    Why on earth would they have picked perl? Perl isn't really a native gnu
    project. At least gcc is.

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3469697&cid=42931395


(I can guess at answers for both. But the questions were two that I'd not
thought of first.)

Nicholas Clark