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Article #2741Re: Big TeX's -- how hard are they to come by?
From: Bruce Stephens
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 10:53
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 10:53
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1696 bytes
>>>>> On 11 Sep 92 07:46:44 GMT, rolfl@karl.uio.no (Rolf Lindgren) said: > When Knuth wrote TeX, he knew what he was doing. This is a fundamental > assumption, and all arguments pro or con should be checked against this. Agreed. > Now, Web, I suppose, supports dynamic allocation of memory through > Pascal's new() operator, whose behavior in extreme cases is unspecified > and the execution speed of which is compiler dependent. It's the `behaviour in extreme cases' (i.e., if there's no memory left) and the fact that in Pascal you can't allocate an array of dynamically determined dimensions. Essentially it's the lack of pointer arithmetic, I guess. Speed has absolutely nothing to do with it (the speed of *everything* is compiler dependent), except, I guess, that he could have done everything in terms of dynamically allocated linked lists rather than arrays, which would obviously have been slower and definitely a Bad Thing in terms of clarity. -- Bruce Stephens. Centre for Mathematical Software Research, Liverpool Univ. Internet: bruce@uxb.liv.ac.uk JANET: bruce@uk.ac.liv.uxb
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!mcsun!uknet!mucs!lucs!hes.csc.liv!bruce From: bruce@supr.scm.liv.ac.uk (Bruce Stephens) Newsgroups: comp.text.tex Subject: Re: Big TeX's -- how hard are they to come by? Message-ID: <BRUCE.92Sep14115253@suprenum.supr.scm.liv.ac.uk> Date: 14 Sep 92 10:53:48 GMT References: <BuEC6r.B47@news.cso.uiuc.edu> <18p7lpINNc73@almaak.usc.edu> <ROLFL.92Sep11084644@karl.uio.no> Sender: news@csc.liv.ac.uk (News Eater) Organization: Centre for Mathematical Software Research, Univ. Liverpool, UK Lines: 25 Nntp-Posting-Host: supr.scm.liv.ac.uk