… Well, no. That’s not exactly what you are thinking of. Except if you are a nerd. I won’t talk about S&M stuff here. Not in this blog, and even less right now. is an awesome programming language, designed for document creation. Actually, that’s not a “real” programming language, I mean, not like C or Python. A document is composed by two distinct parts, each one merged with the other. On the first hand, you have text. Text you want to type, the real content of the document. On the second hand, there are “structural” parts, which allows to describe the document and its content, to specify font, font-size, etc. But these structural parts are not just about “global” structure, it also exists for local usage, like when you want to Italicize some given text. So, you are able to perfectly control what you do with text. But because of this feature, it’s not natively WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). And if I have to choose between perfect control and WYSIWYG, my choice is already done: I keep the control. Nothing’s more annoying than a document which “do what it wants”. People who have experienced problems with (especially old versions of) Microsoft Word would see what I mean.

Anyway, the syntax of this language is very well done, it allows complex evolutions: a consistent amount of other document-conception-oriented languages are derived from . But speaking of is a language abuse, because the real stuff behind it is . is a language more “primitive” than + (mostly called ). In fact, is more like a layer upon . The compiler is using specification, and just allows a more intuitive approach of it.

Finally, I would recommend / to those who want to have a reusable, precise, way to create and maintain clean documents. But if you just want to redact some crappy documents and if you don’t care about paying software a huge price (or if you are a student ), just buy Word 2007, it’s great, as long as you don’t compare it with .