From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" Message-ID: <3A5F3607.53CBF6E6@arl.army.mil> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <3A59E217.D84DBB99@arl.army.mil>, <200101082007.PAA15794@augusta.math.psu.edu>, <93kq8o$cv4$1@nnrp1.deja.com> Subject: Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 17:17:57 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 4c3874ee-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 saroj@bear.com wrote: > No, that is not true. Knuth felt that troff was burdened with > couple of generations' legacy at Bell Labs, and he wanted to > start with a clean slate without fear of hurting any Bell Labs > colleague's feeling (about troff). ? Where did you hear that? It doesn't even make sense. > And finally, he demonstrated that even large programs can be > explained in full detail (unlike most programs written by early > Bell Labs guys), though Pascal is not a great language on which > WEB (the implementation language of TeX) is based. There is of course CWEB. The necessity for WEB was largely due to Pascal's requirement to define things out of their natural order. It is much less of a problem for C. Whether programs are well documented or not really has nothing to do with typesetting languages.