🚀 go-pugleaf

cameron@symcom.math.uiuc.edu (Cameron Smith) writes:

>I don't have the source code to TeX (Volume B of Computers & Typesetting)
>available just now (I returned it to the library; couldn't justify buying
>a copy), and I didn't study it closely when I did have it, but I seem
>to recall DEK's having made a comment that he wasn't happy about
>having to statically pre-allocate tables to hold all of TeX's
>data structures, but that since Pascal implementations were so
>non-standard in their handling of new() he had no choice.

Well, I _did_ buy a copy... and just looked it up.

What he actually said was that he'd avoided pointers (and 'with', 'var'
parameters, local procedures...) so that the code could be easily ported
to _other languages_.

Thus, the problem was not that Pascal implementations handled 'new'
badly, but that it simply wasn't available in some languages. It should
be easy enough to convert TeX to Fortran, f'rinstance, although the
implementation of the data structures would be non-portable.

Sean
--
Sean Case               gsc@coombs.anu.edu.au
"[...] if a poststructuralist doesn't get you,
 a deconstructionist will."--Ursula K. LeGuin