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Date:         Fri, 6 Apr 90 10:28:44 gmt
Reply-To: LaTeX-L Mailing list <LATEX-L%DHDURZ1@unido.bitnet>
From: Sebastian Rahtz <spqr@ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
Subject:      Re: MakeIndex and an apology
To: Rainer Schoepf <BK4@DHDURZ1.uucp>
Status: R
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 69

Rainer Schoepf writes:
 > communicate via this list.  One of the deficencies of MakeIndex
 > is that it is written in C.  That means that there are many people
.
.
 > costs a lot of money.)  My point is this: I think it desirable to
 > rewrite MakeIndex in terms of WEB, not because I think that WEB is
 > a better approach, but because those who run TeX have a Pascal system,
 > and cosequently WEB.
There are *many* Unix sites out there who haven't seen a Pascal
compiler for a long while, as they use the web2c conversion to C.
Knuth did not specify that the output of WEB was to go to a Pascal
compiler, remember. I'd have thought that most sites these days would
choose to buy a  C compiler rather than a Pascal one, if they had to
choose.

I run TeX on 4 Unix architectures (sun3, sun4, hp and masscomp); we
have a Pascal for 2 of those, of which one fails to compile TeX. Only
since web2c arrived have I been able to run a decent TeX service

Sebastian