From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=MAILING_LIST_MULTI, T_SCC_BODY_TEXT_LINE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 7433 invoked from network); 10 Aug 2022 18:02:20 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (50.116.15.146) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 10 Aug 2022 18:02:20 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [IPv6:::1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 28F4940134; Thu, 11 Aug 2022 04:02:15 +1000 (AEST) Received: from mcvoy.com (mcvoy.com [192.169.23.250]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id CC4CF4012F for ; Thu, 11 Aug 2022 04:02:10 +1000 (AEST) Received: by mcvoy.com (Postfix, from userid 3546) id 6BE9B35E0BB; Wed, 10 Aug 2022 11:02:10 -0700 (PDT) Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2022 11:02:10 -0700 From: Larry McVoy To: Jon Steinhart Message-ID: <20220810180210.GZ21168@mcvoy.com> References: <202208101505.27AF5Ko7020961@freefriends.org> <20220810171417.GY21168@mcvoy.com> <202208101737.27AHbupN011923@freefriends.org> <202208101744.27AHiWOT1220324@darkstar.fourwinds.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <202208101744.27AHiWOT1220324@darkstar.fourwinds.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.24 (2015-08-30) Message-ID-Hash: K76OJZQAGJI3GEGJ6WDGLU4BYWQGEURV X-Message-ID-Hash: K76OJZQAGJI3GEGJ6WDGLU4BYWQGEURV X-MailFrom: lm@mcvoy.com X-Mailman-Rule-Misses: dmarc-mitigation; no-senders; approved; emergency; loop; banned-address; member-moderation; header-match-tuhs.tuhs.org-0; nonmember-moderation; administrivia; implicit-dest; max-recipients; max-size; news-moderation; no-subject; digests; suspicious-header CC: tuhs@tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 3.3.6b1 Precedence: list Subject: [TUHS] Re: SNOBOL and RATSNO [ really pic ] List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list Archived-At: List-Archive: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: On Wed, Aug 10, 2022 at 10:44:32AM -0700, Jon Steinhart wrote: > 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 gets it, I'm not the only one. I do the same thing with a big invisble box, it gives you a mental place to place things. Also agree with the "box that fits this text" problem, pic really could use a sizeof("this text in the current font/point size/line spacing") that returns x,y. But I don't see how to do that because pic doesn't have that info, pic would need to be able to ask troff what those are. Oh, and I've written my own crappy version of grap(1) that spits out pic, it was pretty easy. So at least Jon sees pic like I do and I suspect there are plenty more who do as well. Spend some time writing some pic scripts and I suspect anyone can get good at seeing what it is doing. It's a super pleasant little language.