[..] Jim Hall wrote: [..] > > I'm thinking about writing a book about the early history of document > > preparation systems, and RUNOFF seemed a good place to start. I want > > to faithfully recreate the MAD code in another programming language - > > not an automated translation like ESR's translator would do, but an [..]
Ralf Quint wrote: > You seem to be as predisposed as me in always finding new deep dark > rabbit holes to decent into.... 😛 It is definitely a rabbit hole. :-) At first it was just curiosity of "what does this code *do*?" and then it turned into "I wonder if I can rewrite this in something that's easier to understand?" But I have a particular interest in the early history of document preparation systems, including troff (and nroff before that (and roff before that (and RUNOFF before that))). So this rabbit hole was kind of a tempting one to step into. > Well, the Wikipedia page lists at least two MAD manuals (the compiler, > not the magazine), I might just download these and have a look at this > late tonight, Tuesdays I can't get to sleep until 2am anyway and always > watching movies on YouTube gets boring after a while... ;-) That's where I found the MAD manual too. It's interesting reading. Especially so because they didn't write it for someone who had never seen MAD (programming language before). In the part about the "for-next" loop, rather than demonstrate it by saying "let's write a simple program that counts from 1 to 10" they demonstrated it by writing an algorithm to solve a polynomial. That's not a simple way to show something. :-P It takes a little skill to explain something, it takes great skill to explain it *simply* to someone who's never seen it before. Jim _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
