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From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: GA144 use cases
Date: Sat, 05 Sep 2015 09:05:53 -0700
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anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:
> Even if you have a few paragraphs flowing around a figure, you just
> need to reformat those, and can use the parallel-processed ones for
> the majority of cases.

TeX is essentially an imperative programming language, e.g. any
paragraph might have a command that changes the font size.  Of course
that completely changes the formatting of the next paragraph.  It can
also set the equivalent of mutable variables and things like that, which
could also affect the next paragraph.

I've seen some large TeX documents like manuals organized into multiple
files, e.g. one file per chapter.  I guess those could be done in
parallel.  There is some kind of two-pass formatting system in LaTeX
where the first pass figures out the page numbers of cross-references so
the second pass can fill them in.  I guess that can also be used to deal
with page-numbering the second chapter.  I'm not sure exactly how it is
done.  I could imagine some cases where there is a chance of getting a
wrong page number, so for the final production copy, you might have to
format serially to be sure.

Metafont of course should parallelize nicely, first in computing the
shapes of all the letters, then in rasterizing them.