[TUHS] Re: SNOBOL and RATSNO [ really pic ]

[Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com>]

arnold@skeeve.com writes:
> Oh, I'm not arguing with any of this. I'm merely noting that
> you are unusual in your ability to easily visualize pic results
> from looking at the code.

Not at all.  I'm a big fan of pic too.  And I've written preprocessors
for it, such as one that generated GANTT charts.

To me, the best feature of pic is invisible elements.  As Larry pointed
out, xfig uses absolute coordinates and is a mess.  When I use pic, I
usually start out with a big invisible box and hang things off of it.
That makes it trivial to do things like shrinking or growing just by
changing the invisible box size.

In my opinion, the biggest failing of pic comes from the one-way connection
to troff.  It's really hard to do things like "box that fits this text".

Jon