Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!pcg
From: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP (Piercarlo Grandi)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Some things that pointer-less languages can't do efficiently
Summary: TeX a great program? oh no....
Message-ID: <2061@aber-cs.UUCP>
Date: 21 Oct 90 17:27:25 GMT
Reply-To: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi)
Organization: Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth
	(Disclaimer: my statements are purely personal)
Lines: 26

In article <21462:Oct1323:51:3990@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
  
  You don't even realize that the TeX code has been published as a
  book, perhaps the greatest program exposition ever. That's funny.

An no, this cannot pass. The TeX source code is pretty horrible. The whole
idea of literate programming has been satirized effectively in "Programming
Pearls".

Now back to pointers: the TeX source is regrettable because, being a language
implementation, it does need pointer manipulation for efficiency reasons,
just like the Hermes one does. Since however it is written in a language (a
subset of Pascal) without pointers, it has to be ludicrously inefficient by
simulating the store with an array and pointers with indexes in that array.

This to me is neither for or against pointers; it just confirms that
implementations need pointers, applications do not (the TeX language itself
does not need pointers), because implementations are machine oriented (even
if not machine dependent) and applications are problem oriented (and
relationships among data are better represented in other ways than pointers
at the problem level).
-- 
Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi           | ARPA: pcg%uk.ac.aber.cs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk