Yeah, so on-disk compression is one area where we aren't as competitive with NoSQL column stores.
However, two things to note:
1) Often many of those column-oriented DBs, based on LSM trees, actually need to consume a lot more memory to index all of their disjoint SSTables. So it's a tradeoff of memory vs. disk.
2) There are various things we have on our TODO to test, like just running Postgres on ZFS. We'll write up the results when we do.
Even more so, over the years I've seen in the wild and had cause to roll similar multiple entry points to functions, so standard practice predates both those dates by a decade or two. It is always good to see it written down to share the idea to the next generation.
CPC is something I've longed for in the past. I've always thought C could do with just a couple more features related to function call and frame management to make it the ideal portable low level language.
I used it a little bit back when I still wrote Python. It seemed a lot like HTML, but much terser, and whitespace-sensitive. ReST could do the same kind of stuff as HTML: build bullet lists, create tables, italic text, and so forth. However, since I had already learned HTML, learning another language that did the same thing felt like a waste of time. I fully believe that Restructured Text is a better markup language than HTML in some ways; however, I simply don't care because the differences are minor, and HTML is so much more powerful.
On the other hand, TeX was developed by Donald Knuth, a guy who spent his entire life doing research and writing papers about it. It has excellent math support, and is a true semantic language. I've written a few papers in TeX and been very happy with it.
Anyway, if RestructuredText were good at typesetting research papers, there would be no need for this project, would there?
You're confusing the language with the build system. LaTeX wouldn't be very useful without the awesome build system. This project is a build system for producing both high-quality HTML and high-quality PDF (through latex) with a single, high-level ReST markup language. It also uses latex formulas for math.
I mean writing things meant for publishing in IEEE conferences, using the IEEEtran class.
Another concern is: is it practical to include figures drawn with Tikz? I find it the easiest way to lay out many things, but it effectively means LaTeX lock-in.
The HTML format does generate multiple pages for different sections and chapters, completely configurable. The format above is the singlehtml format where everything is on one page. I'd much rather have a link to a specific anchor tag on a page that goes directly to where I want than a citation to a page number on a 200 page document.
"As show on pages 105-107" looks much better than "As shown in sections 4.5.4, 5.1 and 5.1.2". Really. You don't have the first option with HTML and/or sphinx. Oh, and can I have some bold italic text please?
Actually, I despise page number references because often popular resources get republished (because no one has the book from the 70s anymore), changing the page numbers, whereas a section title / number is much likelier to remain correct, and an URL to a paragraph can always be updated.
You can if you must but you know what I mean. Typically you cite a peer reviewed work and reference it in the bibliography with author, year, publisher, etc.
Not really. These are useful bits of bibliographic information, which can give you an idea of a source without having to consult it. And the kind of publisher gives an indication of reliability ranging from peer reviewed to self-published. Including an URL as well, when applicable, is of course very useful (given that it's a stable one).
Agreed, but for my case, I didn't really care too much about the PDF output. The printed version of my thesis is going to sit in my university library untouched forever. I'm much more concerned with having a semantically correct, searchable, beautiful HTML output.
Why not to go the other way round in this case? Typeset your thesis in semantically correct, searchable, beautiful HTML5, and then just add some specific CSS to get the hard print copy?
Unfortunately, browsers are not up to the job so far. For example, page-break-inside:avoid is only supported by Opera[0]. Maybe Prince [1], which is not for free, though.
I don't argue that TeX is good for typesetting thesis. I doubt that sphinx, even with some plug-ins is good for that. Also don't forget that reStructuredText has its own problems (not found in HTML and LaTeX). Can I have some bold italic or italic monospaced phrase example in reStructuredText please? No, really?
