Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!bu-cs!buengc!bph
From: bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.encore
Subject: Re: TeX
Message-ID: <2618@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 21 Apr 89 13:09:45 GMT
References: <8904181517.AA00510@mist.> <6217@xenna.Encore.COM>
Reply-To: bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton)
Followup-To: comp.sys.encore
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 43

In article <6217@xenna.Encore.COM> soper@xenna.UUCP (Pete Soper,,,) writes:
>From article <8904181517.AA00510@mist.>, by pierson@mist.encore.com (Dan L. Pierson):
>> I suppose that it's time to say something.  All of the following is my
>> opinion, not Encore policy.
>
> This goes for me too. But I'm the Encore Pascal product manager and
> [...] you'll find it harder to believe these are just my opinions.

I'm just a grad student, who happens to be excessively fond of these
Multimax machines...  it's getting to be alt.sex time every time I find
another way to speed it up (like speeding up the Blue Flame, for you 
Death Valley buffs :-) and make it float off the floor.  And I haven't
even tried out the C extensions in the Parallel Threads handbook...(yow)
These are my opinions, if not God's word, tho' you never know...

>> 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.
>
> When Encore was very young a survey was done to examine all the compilers
> either available or soon to be available for 32000 targets. With others I
> looked at a few dozen compilers, visited vendors, made charts and graphs
> and finally took part in some agonizing choices based on a number of
> criteria.

Begs the question:  Where went the option to ship several of each?  In
general, I imagine there are licensing and packaging and other
logistical concerns to be added into the economic determinations, but
is that decision, the one that a potentially constraining partition
will be erected in the programming space, an easy one made early with
arguments of "two compilers is twice the cost, pick one;" or is it left
until a few more bits of data come in to confirm that some other need
is preventing the minor luxury of multiple dialects of a language?

> As for compilation speed, we solved this by speeding up the hardware :-)

A-men!  (Plug Alert!)  These babies hummmmm.  (Okay, so it was a short
plug... well, maybe just one more :)  And we haven't even seen the
newfangled XPC processors, yet.

				--Blair
				  "RRRrrrrrrramming Speeeeed!"
				   - Captain Nemo.