Message-Id: <9311031631.AA24543@sc.ZIB-Berlin.DE>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Date:         Wed, 3 Nov 93 15:33:22 MET+1
From: Siep Kroonenberg <N.S.Kroonenberg@ECO.RUG.NL>
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:      Re: I do not like 'nf' in style names
Status: R


Gabriel Zachmann's reaction actually made me angry:

> "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 :-| ).

I mainly work under MS-DOS, as the majority of all computer users,
and consider it only natural that LaTeX accomodates MS-DOS users,
whether or not their OS is a stupid OS.

> 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.

This is a perfectly valid attitude. LaTeX is tool for
writing papers, and shouldn't force people to spend an inordinate
amount of time on upgrading to new versions and making their
documents compatible again. Some people like to tinker, some just
want to get the job done.

> And if the changes in the documents can be done with an awk-script once
> and for all, i don't see a problem.

For most MS-DOS users, AWK is NOT in their everyday toolbox.

Siep Kroonenberg