Message-Id: <199402071724.AA17367@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Mon, 7 Feb 1994 17:08:21 LCL
From: Mike Piff <M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Additional features
Status: R

From:          David Rhead <David_Rhead@vme.ccc.nottingham.ac.uk>
%>
%>The "will it be backwards compatible?" dilemma that seems to be troubling
%>Mike Piff is not peculiar to LaTeX.
%>
%>The question of
%>     If it is a choice between "getting things right" or "backwards
%>     compatibility", does one insist on "backwards compability"?
%>has been asked before, and I think the consensus was
%>     No.  Get it right.
%>

I agree with the "get it right" philosophy as regards programming languages
of the Algol family is concerned, as one can get the compiler to check for
problems. In a sense, the compiler would read the style file and beep errors
whenever it met something it didn't like. But this doesn't happen with TeX.
TeX reads the style file and beeps errors only when someone (else) expands
the macros you have coded. And anyone who points out that some fairly large
tasks have gone through with no problems should ruminate on the thought that
Lamport's book presumably compiled under LaTeX despite all the errors
discovered since. (In LaTeX and in TeX)

(On the other hand, try telling Microsoft and the Unix people that they ought
to be moving into a better language than C, and re-coding megabytes of
stuff...;- >

%>Where does that leave anyone who wants
%>>    A reassurance!  \@startsection is cast in stone and will never
%>>    disappear or change its meaning again.
%>etc.?
%>

For example. I could probably go away and count the hundreds of other control
sequences that are private and whose modification is the only way of getting
anything non-standard to work. (Apart from AMS-(La)TeX stuff, nothing here is
standard LaTeX, as far as I can see, and I am sure we are not atypical. Our
computing services people presumably push Word so much because its
maintenance is less costly in manpower than LaTeX.)

%>Well, firstly, it leaves you in a better situation that with the
commercial
%>products I've mentioned above.  LaTeX 2.09 is public domain, so you can
%>keep it on your computer for as long as you want.  If you want your
%>existing code to work forever, you can at worst keep it working by keeping
%>LaTeX 2.09 available.  (With the commercial products such as NAG, SPSS and
%>Fortran compilers, there would be licensing considerations.) Nobody is
%>going to turn up in Sheffield to destroy LaTeX 2.09 before you yourself are
%>ready to move off it.  Nobody is going to force you onto LaTeX2e or onto
%>LaTeX3.

I have made most of my stuff work in compatibility mode now, after much
effort, but I am not so well organized as to be capable of keeping two
versions of LaTeX online, with parallel style and package files.
I have provided nfss1 in oldlfont style for some time, and to the best of my
knowledge I am the only one who has knowingly used the option newlfont out of
about 50 users! (All mathematicians. One or two use it unknowingly via AMS-
LaTeX.)

%> (E.g., LaTeX 2.09 has "same vertical space
%>before and after lists", which makes it difficult to distinguish paragraphs
%>when block paragraphs are used.  I put extra \vspace in my .tex files when
%>necessary with LaTeX 2.09.  If LaTeX3 "gets it right" I'll have to take the
%>\vspace out of my .tex files.

I don't disagree with that type of improvement.  Most people felt that an
exam paper done with enumerate had too much and too irregular vertical space,
and I had to take it all out.  I also have files which needed \begin{verbatim}
    xxxxx
    xxxxx
    xxxxx\end{verbatim}
before the spacing was right.


Mike Piff

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%% Dr M J Piff, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of %%
%% Sheffield, UK.                    e-mail: M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk %%
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%