From: Toby Thain <toby@telegraphics.com.au>
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Knuth and Pascal (was "Were cron and at ...")
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2020 08:04:21 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <c521ab3e-e250-e84d-205e-c4f52e2a1a4a@telegraphics.com.au> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAKH6PiWT_Q5kt0DqoH-88r2hO3W5MV2qTBdtAreipMaywm7bjw@mail.gmail.com>
On 2020-12-15 6:45 a.m., M Douglas McIlroy wrote:
> 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?
He did even more than that, inventing literate programming and tools for
it, so that he could write in a Pascal-like language enhanced according
to his preferences and beliefs about program exposition to humans.
Because the output of his tools was standard Pascal, Tex and METAFONT
were easily and widely ported.
--Toby
>
> 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
>
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-12-15 13:05 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-12-15 11:45 M Douglas McIlroy
2020-12-15 13:04 ` Toby Thain [this message]
2020-12-15 19:18 ` Bakul Shah
2020-12-15 19:27 ` Adam Thornton
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=c521ab3e-e250-e84d-205e-c4f52e2a1a4a@telegraphics.com.au \
--to=toby@telegraphics.com.au \
--cc=tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).