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              from"zach@IGD.FHG.D400.DE" at Nov 3, 93 01:51:49 pm
Date:         Wed, 3 Nov 93 14:57:17 CET
From: Joachim Schrod <schrod@ITI.INFORMATIK.TH-DARMSTADT.DE>
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To: Multiple Recipients of <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Subject:      Re: your mail
Status: R


Gabriel Zachmann wrote as an reply to Michal:
>
> "The last, but not the least point.  Quite a few OS-es is limited to
> "eight characters in a base part of file names...
> yes, it IS the least point ! as you state quite perfectly below:
>   "You need an old Fortran mind to do that" !
> this stupid eight characters limit is not LaTeX's problem, but is the
> problem of those who wrote the stupid OS (or the problem of those
> who use it :-º ).

But sometimes one is not in the position to choose a system. Your
boss chooses it for you. Not everybody is working at a research
environment like the FHG.

> In general, if LaTeX-users are too anxious about updating their documents,
> it's their problem. People working under the motto
>    "if ain't broke, don't fix it" , as you put it,
> these people don't deserve better software.

We have hundreds of long-living documents that use constructs like

    $({\it colon}, {\it space})$

all over the place. If they won't work with a new system, I won't
switch. And I will recommend the same action to _everybody_ in a
similar situation.

I don't want, that a system determines my work. I.e., improving the
contents of our scripts is more important than adapting to a new
system. Btw, you can't change this with a ``simple awk'' script like
you put it.


I don't have a problem, if the constructs above won't work with
documents starting with \documentclass. But if they start with
\documentstyle, they *must* be compatible. The
installation-effort--to--use-enhancement ratio is too low otherwise.

--
Joachim

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Joachim Schrod			Email: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de
Computer Science Department
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany