Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!pucc!EGNILGES
From: EGNILGES@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: TEX Implementation Language Zero (was: one large array in Pascal)
Message-ID: <6000@pucc.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 30 Aug 88 03:28:18 GMT
References: <5262@june.cs.washington.edu> <260@thor.wright.EDU> <479@m3.mfci.UUCP> <36174@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> <1268@mcgill-vision.UUCP> <3868@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu> <4998@claris.UUCP>
Reply-To: EGNILGES@pucc.Princeton.EDU
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 19
Disclaimer: Author bears full responsibility for contents of this article

In article <4998@claris.UUCP>, drc@claris.UUCP (Dennis Cohen) writes:
>
>Wasn't TeX originally written is SAIL?  I seem to remember some reference to
>it in the Pascal sources that I saw many years ago at JPL (gads, that seems
>like a lifetime ago -- working on Univac 1100s, IBM 3032s, ModComps and VAXen).
>
>Dennis Cohen
 
 
Dennis, Knuth writes (Ref. 1) that "a complete version of TEX was designed
and coded by the author in late 1977 and early 1978; that program, like its
prototype, was written in the SAIL language, for which an excellent
debugging system was available".  When I was with Bell-Northern Research
in the early 80s, the DEC-20 systems programmers thought very highly of
SAIL.  The following book is highly recommended for anyone who wants
to learn how to write insanely great code and comments.
 
Ref: Donald E. Knuth, T X, the Program.  Reading, MA, 1986: Addison-
                       E
Wesley Publishing Company. p. 2.