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From: marcel@cs.caltech.edu (Marcel van der Goot)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Common TeX
Message-ID: <1990Nov15.085657.2589@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
Date: 15 Nov 90 08:56:57 GMT
References: <1990Nov14.150714.15442@cnix.uucp>
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In <1990Nov14.150714.15442@cnix.uucp> klaus u schallhorn (klaus@cnix.uucp)
complains about the

> awful chattyness of TeX. 
and
> TeX's "lust" to talk, and to talk, and to talk....

However, klaus continues 
> Please note that I don't regard myself as being familiar with
> TeX. I've just compiled it yesterday, [...]

WOW! You must be a real genius! You just compiled the program, you
aren't quite sure yet whether it compiled correctly, you haven't used
TeX before, and already you know completely what's wrong with the
program. Thank you so much for this insight, I'm sure all readers
of this group have been waiting for it.

> I would have loved to
>     cat whatever | tex | lpr -dvi
> [...]
> [...] even knows unix?

Do you?
Why do you prefer typing "cat whatever.tex | tex" instead of
"tex whatever"? The desire to type 7 extra characters is very
unlike UNIX.

> Next thing I noticed, you can't ^C out of TeX, [...]

Maybe you did not compile it correctly? The TeX versions I have seen
(yes, under UNIX) all react to a ctrl-C with a prompt, at which
you can, among other things, type an X to terminate the program.

Have you considered that maybe the reason that TeX talks and talks and
talks is that you make errors and errors and errors? And you would
"love" to pipe your text with all those errors directly into lpr?

I can assure you, if you write complicated macros, every bit of
information you can get is welcome in case of errors. What do you suggest
as alternative error messages? "memory fault", "bus error", "?" maybe?

Anyway, enough flaming; to say something constructive:
One way to get rid of error messages is to type Q at the first error
prompt. A better way, in TeX 3.0, is to put
  \errorcontextlines=-1
(or =0, or =1, or...) in your input file.

As for "Common TeX", as far as I can tell this is just Knuth's program
rewritten for C/UNIX the hard way. The obvious disadvantage of that
is that it's hard to stay up-to-date that way. The next version is
supposedly going to be 2.95. Amazingly, according to
Piercarlo Grandi (pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk) and Doug McDonald
(mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu), Knuth's program is some terrible hack
whereas Common TeX is a beauty. You would almost think it was
rewritten from scratch. The main reason seems to be that the
Common TeX program is more readable than Knuth's program. I feel
I should point out, though, that most people just run TeX to typeset
their papers, rather than read the program. But then, typesetting can
be done with troff...

Have a nice day.

					Marcel van der Goot
					marcel@vlsi.cs.caltech.edu