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From: ken@rochester.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: A question about WEB and bibtex
Message-ID: <24957@rochester.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 18-Feb-87 02:31:05 EST
Article-I.D.: rocheste.24957
Posted: Wed Feb 18 02:31:05 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Feb-87 06:48:18 EST
References: <1605@utastro.UUCP> <60400006@umn-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: ken@rochester.UUCP (SKY)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 18
Summary: sure, but is it worth the trouble?

Yes, of course what you suggest is possible. I remember a Software
Practice and Experience paper on CONVERT, a program for automatic
conversion of language dialects. I once had to do an automatic
converter for COBOL (shudder) with sed scripts.  (It's always the last
5% that's hard - COBOL can have uninitialized variable and record
alignment problems too!)

Knuth has been criticized for picking Pascal for TeX. In retrospect his
choice is not as bad as it seems. There were no C compilers for the
DEC-20 then. Also Pascal has spread TeX to many operating systems. As
Pat Monardo has demonstrated, once the algorithm is right, mechanical
translation into a decent language like C is not a problem.

Tangle was only meant to relieve some of the shorcomings of standard
Pascal.  It won't bear too much stretching beyond its original
charter.

	Ken