Message-Id: <9302111013.AA09147@sc.zib-berlin.dbp.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Date:         Thu, 11 Feb 93 11:11:50 +0100
From: rolf.lindgren@USIT.UIO.NO
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
To: Multiple Recipients of <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Subject:      makeindex
Status: R


>>>>> On Wed, 10 Feb 93 17:38:14 +0100, tarjeij@EXTERN.UIO.NO said:
> As a system manager I want the easiest system to administrate. I want a system
> that I can _mend_ when something goes wrong. E.g. when users run out of memory
> in TeX. I want to be able to fix these things in minutes, not in days and weeks
> and I want to know as little as possible about TeX and Metafont (or Web for that
> matter). As a system manager the best TeX I have is emTeX (requires least work).

As a systems manager the best TeX I've worked with is OzTeX, a rewrite to
Modula-2 for the Macintosh, where there's a configuration file to create
ludicrously enormous TeXs from.

I'm not certain about what you mean by TeX maintainability, but unless I
misunderstand you completely, I guess you are refering to the fact that
TeX (i.e. WEB) doesn't use dynamic allocation of any of its data
structures, so the values of the most important arrays have to be
relatively easy to modify.

Blue Sky Research, in their Pascal-based TeX (Textures) for Macintosh,
have rewritten the bottlenecks in assembly language and have included
dynamic memory allocation, so TeXtures runs out of memory when the Mac
does. TeXtures is a commercial product, and doesn't requre administration.

It's my notion that TeX/LaTeX with supporting applications should stick
with WEB as its implementation language, beacuse

	- all of it should be in the same language
	- it began in WEB

Now, consider the cost of rewriting all of TeX in C, with garbage
collection, dynamic memory allocation, and etc. In order not to make a
total mess of it, with two separate systems requiring coordinated support,
we shoud abandon WEB TeX and forget it ever existed.

 > [Trivia: According to an article in a recent issue of Computer Language
 > magazine Donald Knuth currently uses cweb.]

 According to a letter by Knuth, he does all his programming in CWEB on a
 Sun workstation running SunView. However, he uses WEB for TeX maintenance.


-roffe
rolf.lindgren@usit.uio.no