🚀 go-pugleaf

> ...  It's only a pity that [Knuth] chose a
> traditional embedded command approach to the typesetting problem,
> rather than something more interactive and immediate...

He really didn't have any choice, since he probably didn't feel like spending
$50k or so (remember this was some years ago) for the sort of equipment he'd
need to build something more interactive and immediate.  He probably also
felt that it would be nice if what he did were usable from an ordinary ASCII
terminal, so that it could be used by the masses instead of just the lucky
few.  (Even today, most of us still work on ASCII terminals.)

A contributing consideration may have been the desire to produce documents
that could be compiled for different output devices without needing manual
reworking.  This implies that the document must be specified in fairly
abstract ways, not in terms of exactly how it looks.  It is possible to
combine this kind of high-level document specification with interactive
immediacy, but it is harder.  Note that Knuth works hard to do things like
"hyphenating" equations well automatically, to avoid manual tuning even in
that fairly-extreme case.  (And you thought hyphenating English was bad...)
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry