From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "Thomas Bushnell, BSG" Message-ID: <874rmuvnxo.fsf@becket.becket.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii References: <20011213173843.5E5683FE56@quanstro.net>, Subject: Re: [9fans] pascal, TeX Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 10:15:13 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 3661f810-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 howard@research.bell-labs.com (Howard Trickey) writes: > Knuth didn't trust Pascal memory management for some reason, so he avoided > using records and "new". He did most data structures in huge arrays of > integers with punny macros to fake up data structures inside them. It was > Pascal with Fortran for data structuring... Knuth's reason for this was not a lack of "trust". Rather, he wanted to make TeX portable to languages which don't have dynamic memory allocation; he wanted it to be reasonable people to write simple automated translators from Pascal to languages like FORTRAN, and so he avoided certain language features in Pascal that are lacked in the other languages he was concerned about. Thomas