Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!visix!amanda
From: amanda@visix.com (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: why do we need initex.exe AND tex.exe?
Message-ID: <1991Mar1.064037.9866@visix.com>
Date: 1 Mar 91 06:40:37 GMT
References: <62097@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <1991Feb27.184944.1@euler.claremont.edu>
Organization: Visix Software Inc., Reston, VA
Lines: 23

dhosek@euler.claremont.edu (Don Hosek) writes:
>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!

One thing I did to save space under UNIX was to make the IniTeX/VirTeX
distinction a runtime flag (basically, I compiled the C version with
all of the #ifdef's changed to 'ifs'), and then made the default value
of the flag depend on the name the program was invoked with.  Worked
like a charm.  Since web2c by default puts all of the IniTeX-specific
routines together anyway, they just won't get paged in if they aren't
used.

Also, on some machines, you even get pretty acceptable performance by
reading in lplain.tex directly...

-- 
Amanda Walker						      amanda@visix.com
Visix Software Inc.					...!uunet!visix!amanda
--
"The map is not the territory."		--Alan E. van Vogt