[9fans] pascal, TeX

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@speakeasy.net>]

i think knuth is the counterexample that proves the point.
knuth lives on his own planet. i believe it's called
"the art of computer programming." ;-)

also, due TeX's pascal heratage, it has an ungodly number
of compiled-in limits.  i haven't looked carefully for a
long time, but it seems that the maintainers have just made
the limits really big or changed the code in some way. in
the day (working on 780s) it was always fun to recompile
TeX to finish a document (because you'd blown some limit
you'd never heard of before).

not to start a flameware (troff esentially has the same
problem), but TeX is a great education in Why To Hate
Macro Processors. sendmail does better, but at least with
TeX you can get something useful done at the same time.

erik


Douglas A. Gwyn <DAGwyn@null.net> wrote:
> "Thomas Bushnell, BSG" wrote:
>> "Douglas A. Gwyn" <DAGwyn@null.net> writes:
>> > D De Villiers wrote:
>> > > No Pascal implementation ? Pascal compiler etc etc ?
>> > Why?  What use would it be?
>> It would let you run Pascal programs.

> And what use would *that* be?
> Seriously, are there any major apps written in Pascal?

	TEX was.