Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!beck
From: beck@hermod.cs.cornell.edu (Micah Beck)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: CALL FOR DISCUSSION: comp.text.TeX
Message-ID: <35758@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 6 Jan 90 00:18:17 GMT
References: <14650@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <2173@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl> <768@laas.laas.fr>
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Reply-To: beck@cs.cornell.edu (Micah Beck)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
Lines: 38

In article <768@laas.laas.fr> ralph@laas.fr writes:
>
>I'm all for such a newsgroup, and also that it be bidirectionally
>gatewayed with the TeXhax Digest.  The only qualm I have is with the
>name.  In my opinion, the questions which concern TeX/LaTeX are of the
>sort: 
>1)	How do I do the following in {La}TeX?, or
>2)	How come the following piece of {La}TeX does not do what I
>	expect it to do?
>
>In both of these cases, the problems are language issues concerning
>TeX/LaTeX.  Therefore, I suggest that the name of the group be
>comp.lang.TeX (if USENET accepts uppercase letters) or comp.lang.tex
>(if not).  As precedent, we already have comp.lang.postscript.  I
>believe that the comp.text hierarchy should concern types of text
>processing, e.g., desktop.

I disagree.  While La/TeX is a language, as is postscript, it is used
primarily as a text processing tool, and there are a lot of questions
which relate to *using* La/TeX and the other tools and programs which
surround it (BibTeX, VorTeX, TransFig, ...) which would belong in
comp.text.tex but not really in comp.lang.tex.

The analogy with PostScript does not hold up.  Most people who use PostScript
are using it as in intermediate language for describing documents.  It is
not in itself a useful text processing tool.  It is also self-contained, which
is one of it's main strengths.

Someone, like myself and I think most users, who view La/TeX as
a document description language and never uses fancy extensibility features
would expect to find the group under comp.text. A final point which I
cannot resist: TeXnically speaking, LaTeX is a different language from
plain TeX.  They are built on the same macro engine (TeX), but are not
compatible.  Perhaps we need a comp.lang.tex newsgroup heirarchy:
comp.lang.tex.{plain, latex, slitex, mtex, ytex...}  Just kidding.

Perhaps we can lay this issue to rest along with the upper/lower case name.
/micah