TeX and Pascal [was Re: The joy of FORTRAN]

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) writes:

John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> wrote or quoted:

That's a marvelous description, although it fails to really capture the
perversity of things like array-size-as-type-distinction; when a man
introduces language features that practically every single third-party
implementor has to provide their own workaround for, you know you've
found a Truly Special Genius.

  Dudes, when Knuth was on the hunt for a language to whip
  up TeX back in the day, he figured Pascal was the cream of
  the crop among his options. You got to put that language in
  perspective and see it through the lens of its time!

Pascal was used in the rewrite (2nd version), part of his Literate Programming
thing.  The original was written in SAIL (an Algol-60 derivative created at
SAIL, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory).  The same thing was
true of METAFONT, first version in SAIL, second in Pascal.  DEK used Pascal
because it was spreading throughout the computing world, across tons of
different architectures.  (According to DEK, in his presentation on Literate
Programming at SHARE in San Francisco.)

The thing was, neither was written in "pure Pascal", but rather in his Literate
Programming formulation in which actual Pascal code was intertwined with TeX
documentation for the program being written.  The resulting source was then run
through either of two preprocessor programs, tangle (which stripped the Tex and
wrote out a Pascal source without linebreaks or human comfortable indentation)
and weave (which made the Pascal code acceptable to a TeX processor).

Someone else very quickly created C versions of the preprocessors, and the
modern TeX world was born.

--
Rich Alderson   news@alderson.users.panix.com
      Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
  omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
--Galen