From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] pascal, TeX In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 13 Dec 2001 12:38:43 -0500." <20011213173843.5E5683FE56@quanstro.net> Message-ID: <28022.1008266218@apnic.net> From: George Michaelson Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 03:56:58 +1000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 353d3bde-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > 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 I think a macro processor remains a fundamentally good thing. Else how could Bourne have programmed his shell in Pascal? The problem is divergeant Macro processors. better to have one and make it work well. Isn't that what hit troff/eqn/tbl in the end? I think the real problem for that family was the non-obvious cross relationships of the *orderings* of calling the submembers. if you want to nest equations in a table thats different to nesting tables in a document with equations sometimes. Certainly trying to use eqn to get giant curley brace marks into tabled telephone lists beat me. (I was emulating a manually typeset phone list. you cannot recreate a craft like that with machines, Knuth not withstanding. I tried both TeX and Troff and troff won the day, but it was never quite as nice as the original.) cheers -George