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From: M Douglas McIlroy <m.douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu>
To: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: [TUHS] Knuth and Pascal (was "Were cron and at ...")
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 06:45:44 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAKH6PiWT_Q5kt0DqoH-88r2hO3W5MV2qTBdtAreipMaywm7bjw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)

Off topic, but too much fun to pass up.

>> You wrote your algorithm in Pascal, debugged it, and then rewrote it in your favourite language (in my case, ALGOL-W).

> Now why didn't Don Knuth think of that for TeX?

I'm glad he didn't. He might have written it in Mix. Knuth once said
he didn't believe in higher-level languages. Of course he knew more
about them than anybody else and was CACM's associate editor for the
subject--like a minister who doesn't believe in God.

Doug

             reply	other threads:[~2020-12-15 11:46 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-12-15 11:45 M Douglas McIlroy [this message]
2020-12-15 13:04 ` Toby Thain
2020-12-15 19:18 ` Bakul Shah
2020-12-15 19:27   ` Adam Thornton

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