On 12/02/2010, at 3:50 PM, Matthew Winter wrote:
On 12/02/2010, at 3:25 PM, Chris Lloyd wrote:
In Coders at Work, Peter Norvig recalled working on an interpreter.
To refractor it he printed out all the code, took it to a cabin for
a week and rewrote it with a pen and paper. My memory is pretty
fuzzy, so it may not have been Peter Norvig or even an interpreter,
but a dude printed shit out.
I've often thought about printing out the TeX source code and
reading it like a book, as Knuth intended.
I actually did that once, 1200 pages, looking for a solution to a
table layout
problem for a GUI tool we were building. The TeX source code is
"literate
programming", meaning one tool can extract an executable from it,
another
can extract a book. The book has "twisty-curve" signs where there's
difficult
stuff. Double twisty-curves where there's serious wizardry. I got to
the bottom
of Knuth's "double-twisty-curve" table layout algorithm and he said
"At this
point, we just give up. It's too hard to solve". Pity I had to print
the book to
find that Knuth had no solution :-(... anyhow...
I solved it, and we shipped that code. it was the core of our layout
algorithm,
and folk loved it to death, because it made such beautiful layouts so
easily.
I wish modern web browsers had it instead of the incredible CSS/DOM
catastrophe we have to deal with. And no, it wasn't just good for
tables.
True story...
Clifford Heath.
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