From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-Id: <200101070120.BAA13786@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 07 Jan 2001 04:53:38 +1100."
             <00e901c07809$9a3e8040$8692fea9@coma> 
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
From: Steve Kilbane <steve@whitecrow.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sun,  7 Jan 2001 01:20:27 +0000
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 46e2b91e-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

Boyd's case for [La]TeX being worse than troff:
> they are _ghastly_.

..which is somewhat less reasoned than I'd hoped for. Got anything
other than personal dislike?

> my 'lamport was a screwhead' comes from my two years at PRL.

It also comes across as an attack on Lamport, rather than on
LaTeX, so it still needs backing up.

> lame defense, but i'm entitled to my opinon.

Absolutely. You're welcome to prefer troff to *tex, but I'd
be really interested if you could justify that preference based
on the packages' corresponding merits. C'mon, you can do it. :-)

> if tex was so great, where was the need for latex?

Same reason you had troff -man. It's a macro language;
you provide macro packages to make life easier.

steve