On 15 February 2015 at 17:56, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d-announce <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote: > On Sun, 2015-02-15 at 15:37 +0000, Craig Dillabaugh via > Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: >> On Sunday, 15 February 2015 at 11:36:22 UTC, Russel Winder wrote: >> > > […] >> > Luxury. I typed my thesis (including the maths equations) using a >> > broken portable manual typewriter. ;-) >> >> And you tell new students these days, and they won't believe you :o) > > There is one wonderful upside to this story, the examiners appreciated > the complexity associated with changing anything, that they took > considerable effort to find the minimum changes necessary that could > be done with Snopake and a pen. > >> […] >> Of course, TeX is also a programming language, so for developer types >> it does present its own distraction. Luckly TeX coding is so obtuse >> it is never a serious temptation. > > Uuuurrr… like m4, once you get into it it isn't so bad.
Hmm, yeah. Depends on the application use of m4 though. I've been at a company who used m4 to generate all their DNS zone files. In which you'd get high marks for having a way to add/remove records that was relatively low maintenance cost, but low marks for complexity of adding features/debugging bugs in the wiry maze of macros. :) Iain.