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From: mash@mips.UUCP (John Mashey)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: embedded-command text systems
Message-ID: <259@mips.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 10-Dec-85 15:44:02 EST
Article-I.D.: mips.259
Posted: Tue Dec 10 15:44:02 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 12-Dec-85 05:27:32 EST
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Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
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Ed Nather writes:
> While I agree that ugliness often lies in an underdeveloped sense of style,
> I can't agree with Brian's solution, as exemplified by the Scribe text
> formatter: don't let the user get at the machinery because he'll muck it up.
>...
> 
> But it's not clear to me you can't have a system that allows the user to
> specify, in a general way, what he's after, and still permit him to reach
> under the hood and twiddle if he's willing to learn how.  Since many ...

This is something we tried to do with the old -MM macros, but it always
seems that for any given technology, you reach a point where it is very
hard to maintain the extensibility without severe performance penalities,
or without incredible complexification.  This seems to be a fundamental
design problem: how do you build systems that are easy to learn,
give people a lot of leverage, and whose modification costs rise linearly
as you depart from the defaults, and which can still be modified to
reach a long distance away from those defaults.
For example:
	raw troff lets you do anything, but nothing is simple.
	troff + (good macro package) lets you do many things easily,
	sometimes with serious perforamnce cost.  Certain extensions are
	easily done, but with others, you fall off the edge of the world,
	and need to start from scratch.
-- 
-john mashey
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