[protomyth]

Click specification: "We're currently working on parsing the TeX sources of the specification to generate a more modern version of the CLHS.

This might take a while."

Yeah, that's probably not the message you want to send after all the virtues (e.g. speed) listed on the first page.

[somethingsimple]

Why? They're just being honest about it. It's a large spec and it surely isn't that easy to convert it to a more modern format.

[protomyth]

Put up a pdf (if you have TeX you can get a pdf), but don't make some technical argument that makes you sound slow. This is marketing not a technical talk.

[kiiski]

The CLHS[1] they mentioned has been available online for ages. What they're talking about is making a more modern site. Generating a PDF from the spec wouldn't get them any closer to that goal.

[1]: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index...

[protomyth]

Then don't put a specification link on the home page and wait until it is done. The text is non-helpful to marketing the language particularly when books are actually available and linkable that can be read now.

[blue1]

IIRC the legal situation of the hyperspec is a bit weird and converting to other formats could be problematic. (Perhaps someone else may be more precise)

[eudox]

The HyperSpec is under LispWorks' copyright. The official ANSI document is copyrighted. The TeX sources of the spec, however, are fair game.

[fao_]

It's an extremely large language, with most of the things that are normally availible as libraries, defined as part of the language itself. So of course the conversion is going to take a while, especially if the input data isn't very well formatted.

I don't really see how difficulty porting document sets to a nicer format translates into "This language isn't/doesn't foo", since that's more human error than the fault of the language itself.

[eudox]

It's a giant collection of TeX files from 1994. It's not easily converted into a proper, parseable format.