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From: pierson@mist.encore.com (Dan L. Pierson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.encore
Subject: Re: TeX
Message-ID: <8904181517.AA00510@mist.>
Date: 18 Apr 89 15:17:22 GMT
References: <1102@bnlux0.bnl.gov>
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I suppose that it's time to say something.  All of the following is my
opinion, not Encore policy.

    Date: 17 Apr 89 22:20:52 GMT
    From: bnlux0!drs@sbcs.sunysb.edu  (David R. Stampf)

    In article <2561@buengc.BU.EDU> art@buengc.bu.edu (A. R. Thompson) writes:
    >It's not the Encore Pascal that's deficient, it's the Berkeley Pascal that
    >is terribly deficient.  Namely it passes file variables as value
    >parameters which is a no no.  The C versions of TeX work just fine.  You
    >should get them and everything should be peachy.  If you have a problem
    >please contact us and we will give you a hand.
    >
    
    	If I'm not mistaken, TeX compiles just fine on a VAX running BSD, and
    it doesn't on a max.  If that makes the BSD version deficient ...
    
I'm afraid it's another case of the bad driving out the good.  Oregon
Pascal, is a real high quality optimizing Pascal compiler.  BSD Pascal
is an obsolecent instructional toy with too much non-Pascal wierdness.
We thought we were doing our users a service by providing a superior
product, IMHO we made a mistake by not sticking to the inferior, but
omnipresent BSD Pascal.

    >You should be very careful before you run around calling
    >somebody's procuct deficient when you don't know what you're
    >talking about.  You owe Encore and Oregon Software and apology.
    
    	If he apologizes, will you help him compile it, or will it all
    just be whistling in the wind?  He did ask for help I believe.  In
    fact, the people from Encore (sales people, but people all the
    same) admitted that the Pascal compiler would not compile TeX,
    without *lots* of hand massaging, and offered to help find a
    source for TeX.  It didn't help much since there are some local
    mods, that relied upon a virgin source.
    
Depends on what you mean by virgin source.  I brought up the latest
web2c based TeX on both Mach and UMAX4.2 with no changes about three
weeks ago.  The problem is that I did it by ftping the web2c stuff
from one place, sightly different versions of the web sources from
another place, reconciling the differences, etc.  It works just fine
but is not something I'd want to distribute.  Based on this, I believe
that the latest Unix TeX tape from the University of Washington should
compile just fine.

For those who don't know about web2c, this is the new base for Unix
TeX distributions.  The web source is tangled (with a special change
file) to produce the usual Pascal brick.  The brick is then run
though a custom Pascal->C translator and compiled with the host C
compiler.  This has two major advantages even for a system with BSD
Pascal: the C executables are smaller and about twice as fast, and
with the web2c version you can escape from TeX's use of 16-bit
internal memory indexes.  The second advantage can be very helpful to
heavy LaTeX+BibTeX+PicTeX, etc. users.

                                            dan

In real life: Dan Pierson, Encore Computer Corporation, Research
UUCP: {talcott,linus,necis,decvax}!encore!pierson
Internet: pierson@encore.com