latex3 VS nests-and-insects

I never got deep into TeX, but I browsed the code at one time and some of what I found seemed utterly insane to me. For example, it includes an IEEE floating point implementation, based entirely on TeX string expansion [1]. I don't know if it is widely used, but I'm not surprised by slow LaTeX compiles anymore.

You say "TeX is already heavily optimized", but that's only true for the layout engine. The input language is entirely based on macros and string expansion. That's fine if you're only going to use it for a bit of text substitution. But as a programming language it's inherently slow. (To be fair, I believe Knuth expected that large extensions, such as LaTeX, would be implemented in WEB.)

[1] https://github.com/latex3/latex3/blob/main/l3kernel/l3fp-bas...

I wrote my PhD in LaTex with the simplest template I could find online (luckily someone hat put one up formatted for my university's engineering department and I didn't have to mess with it almost at all).

But once I was done, I wanted to blow off some steam and started writing a silly little tabletop RPG. I decided the rulebook would be text-only for portability with box drawing borders and ASCII tables and stuff, so I spent the first week or so writing a small ASCII typesetting engine in Prolog (because logic programmer).

And then I spent more time writing a vim syntax file so I could read the glorious ASCII with syntax highlighting.

Here:

https://github.com/stassa/nests-and-insects

I'm still looking for ANSI/ ASCII art contributions btw.

Sorry to plug my game but the way it works is that characters have a Base Attack and Special Attack, and which attack hits or misses depends on the Degree of Success (DoS) of the attack roll.

This is absolutely very interesting to me! My own game is inspired by roguelikes and it's got text-based art. I was going to go with pixel art for my next game but you ninja'd me :P

Probably not what you are looking for but my game, Nests & Insects, is designed to remove all arithmetic from action resolution it and it is very, very far from a rules-light game like Lasers & Feeling. It's a roll-under-and-over d100 game. Even increasing or reducing the value of "Features" is done without arithmetic.