GNU Texinfo 5.0 Released

Posted by Unknown on Sunday February 17, 2013 @11:14AM from the aged-to-perfection dept.

Four years after the last release, version 5.0 of Texinfo, the GNU documentation language, has been released. The primary highlight is a new implementation of makeinfo info in Perl rather than C. Although slower, the new version offers several advantages: cleaner code using a structured representation of the input document, Unicode support, and saner support for multiple output backends. There are over a dozen other improvements including better formatting of URLs, improved cross-manual references, and a program to convert Perl POD documentation to Texinfo.

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Re:Things you don't hear every day by VortexCortex · 2013-02-17 17:29 · Score: 5, Interesting

"Nobody could understand the source code anymore without massive doses of caffeine... ao we decided to rewrite the whole thing in Perl."
Oblig xkcd
Obligatory Rebuttal xkcd
This is interesting for two reasons:
0. It was Perl's built in features, such as regex, system calls, and ability to be terse enough to enter a solution on a single swinging pass that make it an obvious choice -- It was made for this type of job.
1. I'm confident that if we have not already, we will soon reach a point where entire discussions can be composed of no text other than xkcd links.