On 1/30/2024 3:43 PM, Jim Hall via Freedos-devel wrote:
[..]
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.
Well, I skimmed over the manual and realized that I ran into this
before, though that might be 2-3 decades ago, when I saw the conditional
WHENEVER statement. I remember some not so serious discussions (might
have been on a BBS) about extending the language to include the WHATEVER
and MAYBE statements... 😛
Ralf 😂
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