Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!ucsd!rutgers!psuvax1!psuvm.bitnet!uh2
From: UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: re: Why TeX?
Message-ID: <66388UH2@PSUVM>
Date: 4 Jan 89 15:38:33 GMT
References: <4020@omepd.UUCP>
Organization: Penn State Erie, Behrend College
Lines: 18

In article <4020@omepd.UUCP>, pcm@iwarpj.intel.com (Phil C. Miller) says:
>
>
>[In my opinion,] The LaTeX system is very much like a higher level
>language.  The TeX system is more like an assembly language.  *roff is


I like the analogy to programming languages, but equating TeX (and
by extension plain TeX) to assembly is going to far, I think.
How about this:  Plain TeX is a 3gl such as Fortran, C, or Pascal.
LaTeX is the same 3gl in an organization where many prewritten
software libraries have been written.

I don't use LaTeX because its pre-written libraries are never quite
what *I* need.  I prefer Plain or Vanilla TeX because it is
easier for me to figure out how to get my desired format starting
from scratch than by trying to divine all the mysteries of LaTeX.

lee