> That friend kept asking me to write a converter that would convert a file of TeX to a file of HTML. I kept telling him that such a converter was impossible because TeX was a programming language and HTML was not.
According to Massimiliano Gubinelli (please take a look at the following comments thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27820466, in particular at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27822662), the reason why a converter is impossible is that the _syntax_ of TeX is Turing complete. If one had kept syntax and programming constructs separated, then a converter would have been possible. (I understand the argument only superficially but I trust Gubinelli enough to report this here).
Yes, I considered justifying the impossibility of writing a TeX to HTML converter by saying that TeX was Turing complete and HTML was not. Yup, I considered doing that! Then I just made a simpler and less technical claim!
According to Massimiliano Gubinelli (please take a look at the following comments thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27820466, in particular at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27822662), the reason why a converter is impossible is that the _syntax_ of TeX is Turing complete. If one had kept syntax and programming constructs separated, then a converter would have been possible. (I understand the argument only superficially but I trust Gubinelli enough to report this here).
> Future of TeX?
is TeXmacs, worth trying