Re: Why I am unwilling to use Mathematica if I can help it

Minor correction: there *is* a TeX front end (the WEB system of
literate programming) that DLK himself wrote in 1982 to
typeset programs. In fact, the original (frozen) source of TeX is
written in WEB-Pascal.

WEB seems to have had little use since as compared to TeX
and LaTeX, though. I gave it a quick try in the mid 1980s and
debugging a large code (~2M lines on a vax) was a nightmare.
It was not a tool suitable for team development because
of total lack of source control mechanisms.

If TeX80 had been originally developed on Unix systems, which
were not that common at that time, the story might be different.

.

Relevant Pages

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