siderea: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] siderea at 02:18pm on 2004-12-16
I'm not sure about LaTeX, but I seem to recall that TeX was a full programming language -- I seem to recall Rhu Greene implementing Basic in TeX.

WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS had an awesome macro language, which was, indeed, a full-fledged language within the application-as-OS. I don't know that it had a name, but it is something I programmed in professionally.


 
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.livejournal.com at 08:46pm on 2004-12-19
I too have programmed professionally in the Word Perfect 4.2 macro language! And I don't think it had a name.

I remember using Word Perfect, Word Perfect Program Editor, and Word Perfect Macro Editor together. In a bubble-gum-and-string system (but it Did The Job, doggone it, and they were still using it a few years after the last time I touched it), I had dBase invoke a DOS batch file which called Macro Editor to edit a Macro Editor macro, when invoke it again with the new macro to edit a Word Perfect macro, and finally call Word Perfect with that macro.

I also used Program Editor macros to write most of a Pascal-to-C translator.

While simply "Word Perfect with 'reveal codes' on" is just markup like HTML is, I do consider macro languages contained in such things as Word Perfect 4.2 or Lotus Symphony to be programming languages if they can do more than simply record a sequence of keystrokes and play it back. Writing your own macros is programming; merely editing a document is ... merely editing a document.

I haven't gotten around to checking whether current incarnations of Word Perfect have a useful macro language. I used to make 4.2 jump through hoops backwards.

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