From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
From: saroj@bear.com
Message-ID: <941sfj$rk7$1@nnrp1.deja.com>
References: <200101082007.PAA15794@augusta.math.psu.edu>, <93kq8o$cv4$1@nnrp1.deja.com>, <3A5F3607.53CBF6E6@arl.army.mil>
Subject: Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book
Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2001 16:25:47 +0000
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 4dab671e-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

In article <3A5F3607.53CBF6E6@arl.army.mil>,
  "Douglas A. Gwyn" <gwyn@arl.army.mil> wrote:
> 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.
>

It is somewhere in his "Digital Typography" book.

> > 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.
>
[snipped]

> Whether programs are well documented or not really has nothing
> to do with typesetting languages.
>

I was referring to TeX and MetaFont implementation.

- Saroj Mahapatra



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