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From: dhosek@euler.claremont.edu (Don Hosek)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: why do we need initex.exe AND tex.exe?
Message-ID: <1991Feb27.184944.1@euler.claremont.edu>
Date: 28 Feb 91 02:49:44 GMT
References: <62097@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Sender: news@jarthur.Claremont.EDU
Organization: Harvey Mudd College
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In article <62097@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>, xiaofei@acsu.buffalo.edu (Xiaofei Wang) writes:
> why do we need initex.exe AND tex.exe? for example, both are supplied with
> sb30tex distribution while tex.exe's job can be done by ``initex &plain foo''? 
> I think we just need initex.exe.

You know what? You're right. In most implementations, IniTeX is
nearly as fast as VirTeX (that is, TeX with no format preloaded).

When TeX was developed, (over ten years ago, remember), it was
designed to fit into the existing machinery and still has some of
those assumptions built into it (thus the 64K limit on main mem,
for example). The larger executable for IniTeX would take
substantially longer to load than VirTeX. Preloading was created
because loading the larger executable was faster than loading
VirTeX & then the format file. These assumptions are no longer
necessarily valid. With the advent of BigTeX, for example, under
some undump systems, a preloaded executable can be downright huge
(ugh).

But as for IniTeX, it is slightly slower, will not preload a
format by default (which VirTeX will), and it may not be
desirable to allow users access to the \dump command in standard
TeX. On the other hand, one of the big mistakes Knuth made in TeX
3.0 was not allowing hyphenation patterns to be loaded in VirTeX
(it makes more sense now that there can be more than one) so
IniTeX has a little more flexibility in that respect.

An interesting note: when I talked to Knuth at the Stanford TUG
meeting back in 89, I commented that I was thinking of making TeX
and iniTeX into a single executable under VMS. He responded by
telling me that on his personal system, he hasn't even compiled
TeX and uses IniTeX for everything!

-dh

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