camilochs

I rewrote it. The "how young this is" section is gone, and the design section is now in my own words. Thanks for the push!

The thing is, my goal was to enhance the text editor and improve the error messages, but not to abandon TeX. That's the price I have to pay.

Types are just the mechanism. The real problem is the one fph pointed out: LaTeX reports errors in its own terms instead of the author’s, and review comments live somewhere else. Gradual typing is simply how the compiler can understand the names you introduce without pretending that all of LaTeX can be typed, because it can't.

It does not take some other language and compile it down to LaTeX. LaTeX itself is the source, and it goes through unchanged. What ExactTeX adds is a layer of checks and diagnostics based on the names and annotations you introduce. If anything, AI-assisted writing makes that layer even more valuable. Agents can generate LaTeX quickly, but they also make mistakes quickly, and an error like "Missing } inserted" is no more helpful to an agent than it is to a human.

I agree that Typst is nicer to write. The difference is simply in the approach. Typst replaces LaTeX and expects you to migrate, while ExactTeX is a strict superset. You can rename a `.tex` file to `.xtex`, keep the exact same output, and add checks only where you need them. It is meant for the existing papers, templates, and journal classes that are not going away. Typst works well if you can leave LaTeX behind. ExactTeX is for cases where you cannot or do not want to.