mån 2021-04-05 klockan 16:30 +0000 skrev Farley, Peter x23353: > True. There is m4 in *ix systems and going back a long time there > was ML/1 (I think there was an academic book published on that one, I > think I have a copy somewhere around here). Undoubtedly others I do > not know of or remember. > > Probably also Wirth's "literate programming" suite, TeX I think it is > called. > > But IMHO none easy to learn or use.
TeX and METAFONT were written in Knuth's web language, something which makes a good mathematician at ease and able to understand and describe algorithms. Including typography algorithms but also indexing and cross-referencing to. Web code is nice to read and understand. Tangle and cweb is early translators for web to Pascal and C. web2c is the current one used when building TeX itself. I wouldn't compare M4 with WEB but WEB could be compared to AWK (or CL) WEB requires a fairly good ability to abstract and not being chained to imperative languages..... Compare with ML (though that has a big root in DEC10.) WEB has a streak of the same trait as COBOL was designed to have, the possibility of reading the code in 4-8 years time and understanding why things was done the way they were done at writting time. WEB could also be compared with APL. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
