Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!rutgers!rochester!ken
From: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: CALL FOR DISCUSSION: comp.text.TeX
Message-ID: <1990Jan6.043601.28480@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 6 Jan 90 04:36:01 GMT
References: <14650@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <2173@ruuinf.cs.ruu.nl> <768@laas.laas.fr>
Reply-To: ken@cs.rochester.edu
Organization: University of Rochester Computer Science Department
Lines: 26
Address: Rochester, NY 14627, (716) 275-1448

|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.

This point of view has some merit but I believe most people post as
users (myself included) or system maintainers rather than as TeX
programmers. A small fraction of readers hack macros. Note that many
requests go "has somebody done a style file for this?"

So while technically (sorry, pun unintended) TeX is a programming
language, I think most of us see it as a text processing system.  We'll
just have to accept this a taxonomy overlap.  Gnuemacs is also
programable but nobody suggests comp.lang.gnuemacs.

I might change my mind if somebody proposes an ANSI standard for TeX.
:-) :-( (I hope not.)