Star TEX: The Next Generation

While TEX is unanimously praised for its typesetting capabilities, it is also regularly blamed for its poor programmatic offerings. A macro-expansion system is indeed far from the best choice in terms of generalpurpose programming. Several solutions have been proposed to modernize TEX on the programming side. All of them currently involve a heterogeneous approach in which TEX is mixed with a full-blown programming language. This paper advocates another, homogeneous approach in which TEX is first rewritten in a modern language, Common Lisp, which serves both at the core of the program and at the scripting level. All programmatic macros of TEX are hence rendered obsolete, as the underlying language itself can be used for user-level programming.