[andor]

Maybe it's not what you intended, but to me you seem to be proud of your ignorance about a piece of software that's part of computer science history. Instead of writing that comment, you could have learned something by reading about TeX on Wikipedia.

[phaemon]

I shouldn't seem that way to anyone reasonable.

I know what TeX is. I should know what luatex is because I've been to their website, read through some links and even read through the introduction to their manual, and still I don't know.

And just listen to yourself: if I want to know what luatex is I shouldn't find out on their own website, I should have to go to Wikipedia?!

Do you know what it is? You've managed to reply to me twice and in neither of those replies have you simply stated: "luatex is software that does x. You'd want to use to to do y."

[CatMtKing]

Coming from a position such as yours, here's how I interpreted it:

pdfTex will take TeX input and output PDF (and apparently other file formats as well).

LuaTeX should do the same (being a drop-in replacement), the difference being that it can also use Lua scripts to control how the output is formatted (versus everything being written in TeX).

[phaemon]

> pdfTex will take TeX input and output PDF

Ok, well, maybe I don't understand TeX at all, because I thought that's exactly what it did.

EDIT: Ahh, wait, I have it! When they say "extension" they mean "implementation"! They actually replace TeX as an engine. Is that right? So, luaTex is just an implementation of TeX written in Lua?