From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] pascal, TeX
In-Reply-To: <3C18EF44.38244A15@strakt.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0112131313110.19799-100000@weyl.math.psu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 13:21:15 -0500
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 355c80a2-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025



On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Boyd Roberts wrote:

> Bourne programmed his shell in SHELLGOL; one of the true ghastly
> abuses of the preprocessor:
>
>     IF foo == bar
>     THEN
> 	baz();
>     ELSE
> 	boom();
>     FI

That's perfectly valid A-68, BTW.  And yes, degree of cpp(1) abuse is
horrible.  OTOH, I'm regulary seeing worse ;-/

> And the only way to modify the Bourne shell was to stick with the
> SHELLGOL, because at least it would maintain a consistant style.
>
> I think laTeX is the definitive answer to why TeX is a poor
> piece of software.

Now, that's hardly fair - you are blaming TeX for ugliness of SCRIBE
lookalike written atop of it.  AMSTeX is actually quite nice - for
mathematics-related text it wins hands down.  For anything CS-related
I'd pick troff, but...