first draft

mmt-stex/rebuttal.txt

@@ -6,3 +6,32 @@ little related work (javadoc not literate programming issue)
 
 
 ---------------- Rebuttal ----------------
+
+Let us start off with clarifying that the paper is intented as a Systems paper. Therefore
+related work and theoretical aspects are downplayed.
+
+Even though we focus on MMT and sTeX, our system design scales arbitrary surface languages
+that elaborate into a common base language. Our system implementation is indeed restricted
+to OMDoc as a base language, but it does scale to arbitrary surface languages.
+
+In general, we believe that the base/surface language dualilty (which is pertinent to many
+ITP/MKM/CAS systems) is under-discussed in the community. And we see our system as a
+contribution to this.
+
+The access issues reported by Reviewer 2/3 were a GitLab configuration issue that has been
+since fixed. We acknowledge that the system is hard to install (the LaTeXML dependency is
+heavy), but the system is intended as part of the MMT/MathHub system, which we distribute
+as a docker container as with pre-installed dependencies. Therefore  separate installation
+has not been a priority.
+
+Reviewer 3 misunderstood our (technically correct, but perhaps ambiguous) remark about
+literate programming. We are not claiming that javadoc is an instance of literate
+programming, but that both are instances of the mixing technique, which is an escaping
+mechanism into other langauges.
+
+It is true that the examples in the paper are essentially trivial; they are chosen for
+didactic reasons. The initial motivation for the development is a set of sTeX notes for a
+course of computation logic which cover parts of the LATIN logic atlas, and would profit
+enormously from MMT inclusons. With the system, we can now undertake the case study, which
+is outside the scope of a systems paper. We will discuss this application in the paper. 
+